The Worldslayers
by Sike Saner
Summary: Fourteen years ago, humanity was all but destroyed. Five Pokémon, along with the last human being on the planet, set out to solve the mystery behind the plague-and hopefully prevent history from repeating.
1. The Promise

**DISCLAIMER:** I don't own Pokémon.

 **CONTENT ADVISORY:** Rated T for violence and mild language.

* * *

 **Chapter 1 – The Promise**

The cemetery was quiet, nearly empty. Most people who weren't working or sleeping were staying indoors, anticipating more rain. There was only Syr, a lone arbok slithering up the path between the gates.

The placard marking his destination glinted a faint bronze in the scant sunlight. Syr came to a stop, his eyes roaming over three names embossed in unown-script: ESSAX EVERGRAY. FARRUR URSH NONKU. DROSSIGON URSH NONKU-EVERGRAY. Syr could only hope he'd guessed how to spell them correctly. He'd never actually seen any of the names in writing before.

He inhaled, steeling himself. "Hi, Esaax," he said quietly. "Hi, Faurur… hi, Drasigon." Syr had never actually met the young koffing; even now, it felt a bit awkward addressing her. But leaving her out felt worse somehow. "I hope you're well. Hope you're at peace.

"Anyway, uh… well. I have news for you." Mostly for Faurur, truth be told. But he figured anything that had mattered to her would matter to the others. "I've made some new friends. Friends who might be able to help me look into the deranics for you." Syr gave a faint, sad smile, closing his eyes. "A promise is a promise, right?"

His next breath came in as a loud sniffle, surprising him. When he'd begun crying, he couldn't say. Sighing, Syr brought the end of his tail around to wipe at the lingering tears.

"…I guess I'd better get going, then," he then said. "We'll figure this out. We'll save your people. And… and I'll be careful. I promise."

The arbok took a deep breath and let it out slowly, flexing his cobra hood as he exhaled. "Goodbye," he said on the next, then turned back toward the cemetery gates.

From there, home was about half an hour eastward. Insofar as he could call it home, anyway. His own house had been reduced to a blackened husk so recently that he could still smell the smoke whenever he thought about it. In the wake of its loss, his friend Karo had offered up his home, and Syr and his adopted son Jen had accepted.

But Karo wasn't their only roommate.

Soon enough, the three-story brick house on Bayberry Street came into view. Syr went up the walkway and rapped on the front doors with his tail, to no response. He knocked again. "Coming, coming…" came a rasping voice from inside, accompanied by the sound of something heavy whispering over carpet.

One door opened, and there, holding the first third or so of himself upright in a very arboklike fashion, was Jen. Jen was a cryonide: black and bladed, humanoid above the waist, serpentlike below. Even now, Syr caught himself gawking at him, all but forgetting who he was. It was just that hard to believe this creature was his son—especially given how opposed the boy had been to evolving.

" _I just didn't want to become a_ glalie _,"_ he'd clarified after Syr had seen his new form for the first time. " _We found a way around that."_

"…Sorry," Syr said, acknowledging his own stare. "Is everyone else downstairs?" he asked, craning his neck to look past Jen's long shoulder spines.

"Ren is. He's all the way downstairs. Karo might be with him." Jen moved out of Syr's way as he spoke; once the arbok was well and truly in the living room, Jen curled the end of his tail around the doorknob and pulled it shut. "Everyone else is out."

 _All_ the way downstairs. That meant Ren was probably busy plugging away at a mystery of his own. For a moment, Syr wondered if maybe now wasn't the time to have this discussion with him. _No,_ he finally decided, unable to help himself. _It's been long enough._

He went to a nearby closet, opening the door with his tail, then drew an invisible pattern on its back wall with his snout. There was a _click_ , and then a well-concealed door slid out of the way to reveal a roomy elevator. Syr wound his way in, then drew himself up into a tight coil.

"I need you to come down here with me," he called out to Jen. The cryonide knew the winding halls beneath Ren's house somewhat better than Syr did. Jen complied readily, maneuvering into the lift; both pokémon did their best to scrunch themselves out of each other's way, mindful of Jen's many barbs and blades.

Syr nudged a couple of buttons with his snout, and the elevator began its descent. He was concerned, however fleetingly, when it didn't stop as soon as he'd expected; he was used to exiting at the Vault, home of Ren's personal library as well as his valuables. _Not this time,_ he reminded himself.

Eventually, the elevator's rear door opened to off-white walls and clear, bright lighting, a far cry from the slightly old-fashioned décor above. Syr let Jen take the lead, following him through the halls, weaving around deep gouges in the floor, until finally they reached an open door.

In the room beyond, a smallish figure sat at the foot of a tall, presently-open tube of some sort. It resembled nothing more than an oversized aluminum can, but apparently it was some sort of stasis device. That was Ren's theory, anyhow. He'd awoke within it earlier that week with no memory of the past fourteen years or so, including why he'd gone in there in the first place. Ever since, he'd made trips downstairs to try and make as much sense as he could of the thing, partly to see if he could get it working again, partly to try and jog his own memories about it.

Jen let himself into the room, at which Ren finally pried his eyes and thoughts from the tube. He turned to face the two new arrivals, regarding them through deep brown eyes, and for the second time that day, Syr caught himself staring.

It would be a long time, he imagined, before he'd get completely used to seeing a real, live human being in the flesh again.

Ren Bridges was the man's name. He was short, entirely hairless, and wearing the same Kalos-flag shirt and black jeans as he'd been since awakening. Syr hadn't even wondered why. He'd been too preoccupied with the fact that this man was alive at all when the rest of his kind had been extinct for more than a decade.

"Oh hey," Ren said, shutting the toolbox at his side and hoisting it up as he stood.

"…Hey," Syr responded after a beat. "So, uh… I was wondering…" The sense that he was wasting his words on this human, same as he would've been with any other, was still a little hard to shake.

But Ren had already proven that yes, he really could understand pokémon—yet another of the tube's mysteries. He hadn't been able to prior to emerging from it. "Yes…?" he prompted.

"About your library," Syr went on. "Your books, your videos, anything you've got. I was wondering if there's anything in there about _der-an-ics_ …" That last word wasn't one of his own. He wasn't even sure it was part of any pokémon language. He wanted to make certain that Ren heard it clearly.

"There isn't," Ren said. He furrowed his brow and gazed upward in silent thought for a few moments. "Not by name, anyway. What do you know about them?"

"Not much," Syr admitted. "But here's what I do know: several years ago, off around Rustboro, these weird lights crossed the sky. I didn't know what they were then, but I've since learned that those were the deranics. They came and enslaved some of the poison-types living in the area… including an old friend," he added quietly. "She escaped a few days ago to warn me about them. She said they'd already done something to the world. Something big."

He met Ren's gaze again and found the human's eyes wide and wild, his lips parted. " _How_ many years ago?" Ren asked.

"It…" Didn't feel so long ago at all, especially in the wake of all the reminders he'd gotten recently. Syr shook his head, trying to regain his perspective. "It was almost… oh my God."

Almost fifteen years ago.

Syr didn't say it aloud, hung up on disbelief that he'd never made this connection before. Or maybe he had. He couldn't say for certain. He could barely think.

Nonetheless, Ren apparently pieced it together himself; "Don't you think it's a little strange," he said, "that we'd get a visit from space invaders, or whatever the hell they were, _right around_ the time when an entire species gets killed off?"

Syr had to fight through the buzzing in his brain to find words again. Suddenly the floodgates were open. Suddenly Faurur's words made entirely too _much_ sense. " _That's_ what they did," he breathed. " _Seter—_ … _Seterazu_ … augh…" More "worm-language", as Faurur had called it. He hoped he'd remember the exact words sooner rather than later. "That's what she was talking about. It was them. _They're_ the ones behind the plague, or whatever it was…"

"Maybe," Jen spoke up, quietly scraping his long, bladelike claws together. Syr gave him a questioning look, but the cryonide merely shrugged; apparently he had nothing more to contribute on the subject.

"If there's any chance they were," Ren said, "any chance whatsoever…" There was a tremor in his voice now. Whether it was fear or anger, Syr couldn't tell. Maybe it was both. "I think," the human resumed after a deep breath, "it behooves us to look into this."

Syr felt a trickle of relief run down his spine. There was his next question out of the way. The mission that lay ahead would be difficult—there was no doubt about that. Syr had little chance of accomplishing anything on his own, but with a former Apex League gym leader on his side…

"What about the pokémon?" he asked. "Karo and the rest… do they automatically come too, or…"

"I'll ask them," Ren said. "Karo'll wanna go at the very least."

"I'd better stay," Jen said. "Solonn said he'd probably be back with his dad around Tuesday or Wednesday. We still have a lot to talk about."

A faint, disapproving frown made it to Syr's face, but he fought it back just as quickly. No, he still wasn't entirely comfortable with Solonn. The man was a glalie, after all, and an abnormally large one at that. And he was claiming to be Jen's lost and forgotten brother, brainwashed right out of the boy's memories. He'd specifically come to Convergence to find Jen, in fact, and the thought of this nightmare creature possibly stealing his son away didn't sit particularly well with Syr.

But in spite of all this, Syr tried once again to tamp his misgivings back down. The glalie had tried, after all, to save Esaax. He'd helped free the former wobbuffet from his imprisonment and had reunited Esaax with the one person in the world who could've possibly saved his life.

And there was still a lot no one had figured out about Jen's background. They knew he'd been mentally tampered with at some point, in some way. His own memories, apparently unreliable, told him he'd been under the care of fugitives from a cruel, oppressive nation. He couldn't put a name to anyone in his real family… but he believed Solonn. And truth be told, it was as good a lead as any other where Jen's past was concerned.

"All right," Syr said, and he didn't have to feign the relief in his voice, nor did he have to fight hard to bring it back to the forefront where it belonged. He'd honestly never wanted to drag Jen into this mess. The mission would be dangerous. Even if he could've known exactly what he was up against, Syr knew he wouldn't have felt right bringing his son into harm's way like that.

"Right then. Karo." Ren plucked a great ball off his belt, pressing its button as he brought it forward. White light spilled out, and a moment later it resolved into a nosepass.

It took a moment for Karo to react to being let out. He made an odd little groaning noise, swiveling each of his arms in a full rotation, then pivoted to face Ren with an unpleasant grinding of stone on stone. "What?"

"How are you feeling?" Ren asked.

"Heh. Like I actually _haven't_ exploded in the past few days," Karo responded.

Syr winced. The fact of the matter was that Karo had done exactly that. Syr recalled what had been left of his friend in the wake of the explosion, remembered crawling over scattered stones that used to be part of a living being, and shivered in discomfort.

"I'm glad you're all right," Syr said. It wasn't the first time he'd said it since Karo had stepped out into the waiting room, whole again. But it came out every bit as earnestly. "Listen, there's… well. We've made plans."

"You told him about the things, didn't you," Karo said.

"Yeah… he didn't know any more than we do," Syr said, only to realize Ren hadn't exactly confirmed whether or not there was any information about them in the Vault above. "Right?"

"Prior to now, I didn't know anything at all. But now…" Another deep breath. His grip tightened on the handle of the toolbox. "I've learned enough to know this _definitely_ warrants a closer look."

"So we're gonna go pay these deranics a visit?" More loud grinding as Karo turned to face Syr. "Count me in."

No surprise there. Karo had insisted upon coming along the last time Syr was faced with a difficult task, as well. And he'd proven a valuable asset to the rescue party, even if the mission had ended in failure. "Just… try not to explode unless you absolutely have to," Syr said. "Okay?"

Karo stepped forward, leaning back to look Syr right in the eyes. "Believe me," he said, "when I tell you that I really, _really_ frickin' hate doing that, and when we make it back home, we are going to have a party, cake and all. I mean hey, we already owe _him_ a welcome-back party, right?" he added, waving an arm toward his trainer.

"You don't owe me a thing, Karo." Ren closed the short distance to the nosepass's side and patted him on the head. "I'm just glad to have you around."

Jen craned his neck upward then, clicking his fanged mandibles against his teeth. "I should see if they're back yet," he decided aloud, and headed back toward the elevator. Ren recalled Karo and set off after the cryonide; with no real reason to stay below now, Syr followed.

They arrived upstairs just as the front doors opened, admitting a greninja by the name of Babs. She had a large plastic grocery bag slung over one shoulder and was already heading for the kitchen with it.

Two other pokémon followed her, one at a time… and Syr felt a lump form in his throat at the sight of them. The two of them were kwazai. And even now, it was hard for him to look at them without wishing they were the last pair of kwazai he'd met instead.

But they weren't, he reminded himself with a pang of regret. They were Demi and Acheron, more of Ren's pokémon. Siblings, if he remembered right. The former was a four-armed biped; the latter, a quadruped with very long limbs and neck and tail. Both were sky-blue, with black tails studded with eyes-that-weren't. They'd been wobbuffet once, same as Esaax had. Unlike Esaax, they'd probably had a choice in the matter of whether or not they'd evolve.

 _It's not him. He's_ not Esaax _. He had nothing to do with him._

"Just set those against the wall over there," Ren told the two kwazai, who each carried a hefty stack of long, thin boxes.

Demi and Acheron did as instructed, setting them out of the way—save for one, which Demi began opening as she strode over to Ren on her stiltlike legs.

"What do you think?" she asked him, sliding out a wooden plank. "Nothing like what we had down in here before, I know, but I think it's an upgrade."

"It's nice," Ren said, and he couldn't have sounded more preoccupied if he'd tried. "But the floor's gonna have to wait. We have a more important job to do."

"And that would be…?" There was Babs, leaning in the doorway from the kitchen. Her eyes shifted toward Ren's belt. "Something to do with the nullshade?"

"Hopefully not," Ren said, and Syr agreed, eying the relevant ultra ball with unease, all fangs bared. The creature within had tried to murder his son. Had succeeded in destroying their home. The nullshade, as they were apparently called, could just rot in that ball for all Syr cared.

"No, we're going on something of a mission," Ren went on, letting Karo back out as he spoke. The tension in the human's voice had gone up again, and it stayed high as he explained the situation and illustrated what he, along with Syr and Karo, intended to do about it.

No sooner had he finished than the kwazai siblings voiced their desire to accompany him, almost in unison. This was good news, Syr told himself silently, despite the memories their presence might dredge up. Very good news. They'd be excellent bodyguards and formidable allies in general.

"Think I'll stick around with Jen," Babs said then. "Someone needs to keep prodding at that tube. We still technically don't know what it actually does. We don't even know why you built that thing in the first place. Or when."

"That we don't," Ren said with a small but visible shudder, his gaze dropping floorward. Jen cast him a sympathetic look, softly clicking his fangs together, just as he'd done the last time that particular matter had come up. Missing memories were something the two of them had in common.

The human looked back up at Babs. "Thanks," he told her. "I appreciate it."

"No prob," Babs responded.

"So…" Syr said then, "since we seem to have everything sorted out now, when do we leave?"

"Tonight. Partly for the kwazai's sake, but…" Ren rubbed at his bald head. "Demi spoke with the glalie a couple of days ago, and at some point he apparently said something about anti-human sentiment—people who are glad we're gone. People who don't need to see me." He met Syr's gaze. "Is it true?"

It was Jen who fielded that question. "DeLeo was always worried about that… it's why he asked us to be careful who we told about him." His eyelight briefly dulled. "Then again, he wasn't human after all…"

Syr's gaze fell to the floor. No. DeLeo wasn't human. He was… Syr hissed, unable to say the word, even in his mind. But the face, that all too familiar face, appeared in his mind's eye as if summoned all the same.

He could accept that DeLeo wasn't human. He just wished to God that he were anything, _anyone_ else.

Uncomfortable silence hovered for a few moments more. Then, "Either way… no. Not risking it. I mean, sure, we can probably pass me off as an especially sentimental ditto at least part of the time, but the fewer folks we'll have to fool, the better. So yeah, we'll let the diurnals skip off to bed. The kwazai can ward off everyone else. Demi will be watching our backs for the first night."

"Okay," Syr said. He glanced at the clock… remembered it was broken, and turned to look out the window instead. The clouds made it hard to gauge the sun's exact position, but it still looked far from sundown.

Part of him still worried about the mission—the danger—that lay ahead. But as far as the rest of him was concerned, the sun couldn't set soon enough.


	2. Adjusting

**Chapter 2 – Adjusting**

Off in the distance, the treeline loomed. The forest proper was still minutes away, but from the looks of things, it was intent on expanding its borders. Houses and shops here were largely abandoned, no clear sign of pokémon activity save for the occasional smeargle scribble, but they couldn't be called dead. Vegetation covered the walls, spilling out of the broken windows.

Some part of Syr idly wondered if the entire city might one day look like this, and he supposed he wouldn't mind too much if it did.

The sun had been down for an hour or so when he and his teammates had left home. There was only the occasional working streetlight shining on them as they headed for the woods. If anyone were hiding in the shadows, if anyone were watching, they'd only see a roughly five-foot-tall figure in an oversized gray hoodie, their face obscured. The shape might stir some memories, some suspicions, but it would be hard to be sure what one was looking at with a large, hooded serpent and a tall, many-limbed creature at the figure's sides, partially obscuring the view.

Not that Ren really expected to go the entire distance unnoticed. Nor did he expect he could truly convince anyone and everyone that he was actually a ditto. According to him, ditto had to absorb a few of a target's cells in order to transform into them in their absence. Many people weren't aware of this, but there was always the chance that they'd run into someone who was.

No one else in the party expected differently, either. Sooner or later, someone __would__ recognize what was in their midst.

 _"_ _ _At least I can say I did__ something _ _,"__ Ren had said.

Before long, they finally reached the forest. Darkness swallowed them up very quickly, at which they moved into single file. Demi led the way, her eyes allowing her to see as if in broad daylight, her other, stranger senses combing the trees and brush for anything that moved or breathed or felt. One of her arms was twisted backward in a way that might've hurt some other creature, holding hands with her trainer. Ren, in turn, held the end of a belt, which was knotted to another belt, which was knotted to a third. The last pair of these was tied around Syr's chest.

The arbok was grateful. He could smell just fine, could feel the footsteps ahead of him, had a vague sense of his teammates' body heat. Strictly speaking, he could've followed those alone. He wouldn't have lost track of the others. But seeing as he couldn't exactly see, he might have plowed face-first into a tree, or gotten himself snared in a bramble. This way, neither he nor Ren would go anywhere Demi wouldn't.

The evening was quiet, save for a breeze stirring the branches. Last time Syr had been in the area, the ninjask had been out and singing in full force. He didn't exactly miss the racket, but the near-silence was putting him on edge.

He thought he heard a noise, something cracking off to his left. "What was that?" he asked automatically.

"No one," Demi answered, just as she had the time before. "We're fine, Syr," she assured him. "If anyone tries to start something with us, __they're__ the ones who'll be in trouble."

"Yeah… yeah, you're right." __Gym pokémon,__ he reminded himself. __Kwazai__ followed of its own volition, with the related memories. He knew what her kind could do. Knew, and wished he didn't.

Hours passed without incident. A few more possibly-imagined noises cropped up, but Syr held his tongue. __They'll deal with it,__ he reminded himself. __And so will you.__ He wasn't helpless. He tried to keep that in mind rather than linger on the fact that he'd been utterly useless the last time he'd been in a fight.

 _ _No one's going to use sheer cold on you. Most of the glalie went home.__

"Anyone else getting tired?" Ren spoke up, interrupting that train of thought on its third or fourth go-around.

"Nope, not even close," Demi said, but she stopped walking all the same.

"I… guess I'm not?" Syr realized he actually hadn't been paying much attention to his own physical state. He flexed from neck to tail—nothing complained. "Yeah, I'm fine."

"Right. I suppose this is what I get for being a nightsleeper this past couple of days," Ren mused aloud.

"You needed the sleep," Demi told him. "You'd already gone long enough without it." She turned on the spot. "Shall I?"

"Yes," Ren said, "and thanks."

The next thing Syr knew, the belts around his chest were being tugged from a couple of feet higher. When Demi set off again, her footsteps alone resonated through the forest floor.

The three of them carried on in this fashion for a little while longer. Just as Syr was beginning to feel like maybe he could use a break himself, Demi stopped again, and when he tried to look past her he could see why.

A short distance ahead, the forest stopped rather abruptly. So, it seemed, did the ground. Syr frowned; had they gone the wrong way? He moved forward a bit for a better look, peering down… and saw relatively flat stone just eight, maybe ten feet down. __Oh.__ Here was a place he'd actually never seen before, a place Ren hadn't seen fit to mention when he'd gone over the route they'd take. Which, Syr supposed, meant it wasn't really an obstacle.

He saw Ren drop the end of their makeshift tether, and in the next moment, Demi jumped off the edge, still holding the human in her arms, landing gracefully on her feet. She moved out of the way, then nodded toward Syr, at which the arbok let himself half-drop, half-slide down the slightly-sloping wall.

Demi made to pick up the end of the tether; but, "Hey, uh…" Syr said. The kwazai paused, slowly straightening back up. "Do you think we could take a break here for a little while? It's, well. Starting to catch up to me," he admitted, by which he meant more than the distance.

"We sure can." Ren craned his neck back to look Demi in the eyes and pointed groundward; she set him down at her feet. Once he was on solid ground again, he unfastened the belts around Syr's chest.

"Just as well," Demi said. "Another dinner sounds good right about now." She gazed off into the nearby bushes. "Wanna come with?" she asked Syr.

It took him a beat to realize what she was getting at. "Oh no, that's fine. I'm not hungry." He was thankful he'd fed within the past couple of weeks. He'd seen things recently that could easily kill his appetite if it tried to pipe up anytime soon.

They played across his mind again as he thought on the matter: a blackened corpse and bloodstained walls. Scattered stone, with chilling mist hanging heavily on the air. Sapphire pools spreading around an old friend.

Syr hissed, drawing in upon himself. No, he did not want to hunt right now. And he didn't particularly want to watch anyone else do it, either. Especially since many hunters—kwazai included, from what he'd seen—preferred to devour their prey in pieces.

Demi merely shrugged in response, then strode off under the moonlight, eventually vanishing back into the vegetation. Syr watched her go, then turned his sights back toward Ren. The human was now sitting a couple of feet away, riffling through his backpack.

Getting his mind on some other topic felt like a very good idea right about then. "Hey," Syr spoke up again. Ren looked up at him, his face shadowed by his hood. Syr realized all at once that he didn't actually know what to talk about, so he just said the first thing that came to mind. "…Thanks again for coming with me."

"Mm," Ren said, with a dismissive little wave. He took a swig from his canteen. There was some sort of filter built into the thing, according to him, something that'd allow him to drink from any source along the way. A filter of his own design, apparently, adapted and improved from the models they used to sell at poké marts. "I could just as easily thank you for coming along with me. This business down south concerns me just as much as it concerns you."

Syr didn't respond at first, but then nodded in agreement. It was true for certain if they were right about the deranics.

Silence hovered for a minute or two. Then, "How long have you known?" Ren asked quietly.

"Wh…" Syr's brow furrowed in puzzlement. "Known what?"

"About the deranics," Ren said. "About what they did."

The puzzlement increased. "I already told you, though. They came before the Extinction, and…" __Oh. Of course.__ Syr sighed. "All these years, I thought the only things they'd done were to enslave Faurur and the koffing and force us to leave the area. Maybe I just didn't want to imagine that they could've done even more than that. I don't know.

"Then __she__ came back, and… Ren, that was just earlier this week. And a lot's happened since then." He had to stop and stare incredulously at nothing in particular in the wake of such an understatement. "I just found out about the whole… __Seterhath Zulo-Denvenda__ thing—" __Right… that's what she called it.__ "—and I haven't really had much time to think about it."

He bowed his head. "I'm sorry," he added; it had just seemed prudent.

Ren's hand went to his forehead, burying itself under his hood. "It's fine. I just… wanted to make sure." His own head lowered; Syr could see nothing of the human's face now. A sigh hissed against his palm. "This has just been __so damn much__ to take in."

"It has," Syr agreed solemnly. He thought to say something more, but nothing came to mind. "It has," he merely repeated, and for uncounted minutes after, neither of them said anything else.

Eventually there was a rustling in the brush nearby. Syr immediately turned to face it and saw Demi returning to the clearing. He was vaguely relieved to find not a single speck of blood or gore anywhere on her person. Either she was a very tidy hunter or else she'd thought to wash up afterward.

The kwazai looked both him and Ren over for a moment, a frown slowly forming on her face. Then she stopped in front of them, dropped into an odd sort of kneel, and gathered both of them up into a hug.

Syr initially stiffened in surprise, but soon relaxed. Closing his eyes, he laid his head on her shoulder, unable to stop the tears from flowing. He tried to speak, but his breath hitched in his throat. The sentiment sounded in his mind all the same.

 _ _Thank you.__

\- o -

The sun was finally rising, sparkling on the surface of the river that flowed to their right. Demi was already grumbling under her breath about it. Soon, they'd need to camp for the day. It was just a matter of finding a suitable place.

"There should be a little cave around here somewhere," Ren said, on his own feet again as he searched the surrounding area. "I spent the night in there once while I was making my way through Hoenn. It ought to…"

He trailed off. Syr followed his gaze and moved in for a closer look. There was an unnaturally symmetrical hole at ground level in the eastern cliff, the cavern beyond too dark to see into. "Is this it?" he asked.

Ren didn't answer. Didn't say anything at all for a couple of moments. Then, "Demi? Light it up."

The human got out of her way; Syr figured he'd better do likewise and coiled off to the side. Demi approached the hole in the wall and folded her legs again, then extended a hand into the darkened space. A psybeam lanced from her open palm with a faint hum, filling the cavern with colorful light, pouring harmlessly into the far wall.

"Oh…" Ren said weakly.

It wasn't a cavern. The space was too perfectly-shaped to have occurred naturally. No, this was a __room__ , and it was filled with human-style furniture. It was hard to make out all the details past the dust and plantlife covering everything, but it looked simplistic. Cheerful. Like something out of a human child's room. A moldy-looking lapras plush sat in one corner, its neck limp and doubled over.

He looked back at Ren and found him trembling again. The human's dark eyes were wide and shining with tears. The room was vacant, but he looked upon it as if a ghost were staring back at him.

"This isn't it, is it?" Syr asked quietly. He rather hoped it wasn't, for Ren's sake.

"No," Demi answered, and she cut off the psybeam. "No it's not." She put a couple of arms around her trainer and shepherded him away from the hole in the wall.

It wasn't long before they found the actual cave Ren had been referring to. Silently, the human waved Demi in first to see if anyone had claimed the cavern since he'd last been there. She walked back out a couple of minutes later, giving a thumbs-up.

"Okay," Ren said, then recalled her into her dusk ball. He let Karo out in her stead.

The nosepass stared upstream for a moment after he emerged, then turned to face the cave. "Ah. This place again."

Ren nodded. "We're stopping here til sundown. I need you to block anyone who tries to join us."

"Can do," Karo said proudly, parking himself at the cave's entrance.

Syr didn't doubt him in the least. Judging by what Karo had told him about the battle that had left him in pieces, the nosepass had recently gained a __lot__ of proficiency in the block technique.

 _ _That's all he'll do,__ the arbok tried to assure himself. __Maybe a zap cannon, if it comes to that,__ he conceded. There'd be no explosion this time.

The cave was dark, almost nothing of the early sunlight spilling into it. But Ren was undeterred; apparently he knew its layout well enough to navigate without light, even after all this time. Syr heard the human stop after just a few steps, then felt the belts fall off once again. A moment later, he heard a rustling of canvas.

"Good night," Ren said once he'd finished fussing with his sleeping bag. The fact that he was saying such a thing after sunrise didn't seem to cross his mind.

Syr didn't have the heart to correct him, all things considered. "Good night," he responded, curling up on the floor next to the human.


	3. Wait It Out

**Chapter 3 – Wait It Out**

_No matter where he looked, Syr could only see two colors. Everything was charred a flat black, and a good portion of it all was dusted in powdery, light gray ash. Then something bright yellow walked into view, stepping around the debris surprisingly well for something with such short legs._ Jen, _Syr recognized. His son. A snorunt…_

…Except no, he wasn't a snorunt, Syr eventually remembered. Not anymore. That was when Syr realized he was dreaming and, by extension, that he'd actually managed to fall asleep.

Sleep… had been hard-won, even by the standards of the past few days. Syr remembered staring into the shadows for quite some time, struggling to keep his eyes closed and his mind quiet. He needed his rest for what lay ahead; he knew as much. It was just hard to get, what with the memories of his most recent nightmares.

This time, at least as far as he could recall, he'd been lucky. No blood, red or blue or any other color. No bestial roars or cries of agony. No stench of the newly dead. Just his poor old burnt-out house. It was downright cheerful compared to the last few dreams.

Syr would've nodded off again, as a matter of fact, if it hadn't been for the loud, shrill voice at his back.

"Hey! HEY! The heck are you doing in there; this is mine, mine!"

Groaning, Syr lifted his head. A look back at the cave's entrance showed him nothing but Karo, still standing guard, and the cliffs and vegetation beyond.

"Get out, get _out_ , you stupid boulder!" the newcomer shouted. Syr could hear and feel a series of light thuds as the creature spoke; apparently she was hopping up and down in her rage.

"Hmm…" Karo rocked back and forth on his stumpy legs a couple of times. "…Nah."

The unseen visitor gasped. "Ooh, now you've done it. Now you've done it! I'm gonna—" Do nothing, as it happened; Karo had his block field up, and nothing was getting in past the invisible barrier without a hell of a fight. As it stood, the newcomer merely smacked into the empty air with a noise as if she'd hit a wall. But the failed entry accomplished something, at least. It brought a strange, jagged red line into view, seemingly hovering in midair.

 _Oh._ Syr had heard that this area was kecleon territory, though he'd never actually seen one about. Apparently it still was.

The arbok finally lifted his upper body off the ground and began moving toward the kecleon. He noticed Ren stirring as he slithered— _She doesn't need to see him,_ Syr decided quickly, and mindfully blocked off any view of the human with his coils and hood.

"…Wait a minute, how many of you lousy squatters _are_ there?" the kecleon asked. "Augh, this is ridiculous. All of you, _get out_ —ack!" A little burst of electricity, aimed at nothing in particular, had startled her right out of her near-invisibility.

"Go on," Karo said. His nose was still glowing faintly. "Shoo. We'll come out when we're good and ready."

The kecleon stared at him indignantly for a moment, hands clutched into tight, scaly fists. "No, you'll get the heck out of _my home_ right this instant!"

"Hold on." Syr came to a stop next to Karo, his tongue flicking out for an especially long taste of the air. He met the kecleon's gaze, or tried to; her eyes, swiveling independently, kept darting around. Following them was a bit dizzying. "If this is your home, why doesn't it _smell_ like a kecleon's been living here?"

The kecleon huffed, plainly flustered. "Because I _bathe_!"

Syr shook his head. Her hygiene was irrelevant, and not only because he doubted the river could wash all of her scent off. "If you lived here, Demi would've picked up on it somehow."

"Demi?" The kecleon strained to see past Syr's hood, to no avail. "Don't tell me there's even _more_ of you…" Both eyes turned toward Karo. "…Unless _that's_ Demi."

"Bzzt, wrong!" Karo's nose lit up again, brighter this time. "But here, have a consolation prize."

The zap cannon didn't actually hit anyone, as far as Syr could tell. Generally speaking, people saw that attack coming from miles away and got out of the way if they could, and the kecleon was no exception. He could hear her scurrying away through the bushes outside once the ringing in his ears had stopped.

Karo turned around to face Ren, nose held high in pride. "See? Told you I'd keep 'em out."

"Didn't doubt it for a second," Ren said. He stood, his backpack in hand. "Now let's get out of here in case she comes back with reinforcements. It's nearly sundown anyway."

"I'll take your word for it, I guess," Syr said. The clouds were thicker and darker than ever; he was a little surprised it wasn't already pouring.

As if it already were, "Yeah, no, I'm not walking in that," Karo said. He turned and started waddling back toward Ren. Light spilled out of his capture ball and drew him in before he got very far.

"After you, then," Ren said, waving the arbok onward.

With a slightly delayed nod, Syr faced forward once more and slithered out into the open air. A moment later, Acheron materialized next to him. Syr realized he was already starting to inch away from the kwazai and forced himself to stop, but his upward stare lingered.

If Acheron noticed, he didn't show it. His gaze swept over his surroundings, his tail waving lazily. He licked his lips. "Hmm. The coast is clear, far as I'm aware."

"Good." Ren emerged, wearing his pack once more.

Now that the human was back in the light, Syr could see the bags under his eyes. The arbok gave him a pitying frown. Surely an all-nighter spent on the road had tired the human out—hadn't he gotten any sleep at all?

Ren didn't seem to notice the look on Syr's face as he uncoiled the belt-tether. He wrapped it around the arbok, same as he'd done the evening before, and with that, they were off.

The last of the daylight faded, and the clouds finally burst. In no time, the ground was soft. Ren prodded one of Acheron's already-muddy legs; "He's definitely strong enough to pull himself out of the mud if he gets stuck," Ren explained as the kwazai crouched to pick him up. "I might not be."

"I know," Syr said without meaning to. The arbok could guess Acheron's strength just fine. Even without evolving, wobbuffet were physically stronger than they had any right being, for all the good it did them. "…I don't mean you're weak; I mean…"

"I know what you mean," Ren said. "It's okay."

 _Do you?_ Syr wondered, but kept the question to himself.

The three continued southward, with a sheer dropoff into the river not too far to their side all the while. _He's keeping us from going over,_ Syr told himself in an effort to dispel some of his unease around the kwazai. The heights weren't an issue; Syr hadn't been afraid of falling in and of itself for a long time. But the river ran fast, churned up all the more by the heavy rainfall and burgeoning winds. Getting swept away and bashed into rocks was a very real possibility.

That possibility loomed all the larger as they approached a rather long log bridge. It looked sturdy enough, anchored in such a way that it didn't sway in the slightest… but there were no guard rails, not even so much as a rope to lean against. As far as he could remember, it had always been this way, nothing to either side of him as he'd crossed it en route to Convergence all those years ago. But the weather had been a lot milder then. Now the logs were damp—possibly slick—and either he was imagining things, or the wind was picking up by the minute.

Acheron trusted a single pod to the bridge, leaning into it. Maybe it creaked under his weight. Maybe it didn't. The noise of the downpour made it impossible to be sure either way. At any rate, the kwazai looked back, nodded at Syr, and continued forward with apparent confidence.

Strapped to the rest of the party as he was, Syr had little choice but to follow. Already squinting against the rain in his eyes, he shut them altogether for a moment as the wind howled past. His muscles tensed of their own accord, and he hissed through his teeth. _It's safe, it's safe, it's safe,_ he tried to assure himself. "It's safe…"

"It's safe," Acheron confirmed, speaking loudly over the rain.

Syr might've been more surprised to learn he'd begun saying it aloud if he weren't so focused on the weather. "I'm not so sure," he admitted.

As if to underscore his doubt, thunder rumbled in the distance. A flash off to the south caught Syr's eye, and the thunder sounded again.

"…Hm. I think," Ren said, half-shouting over the noise of the storm, "we need to pick up the pace."

"Right," Acheron agreed, and looked back toward Syr again. "Get ready to scoot."

That was all the warning the kwazai gave before taking off at a gallop. Syr gave a strangled yelp as the tether yanked him forward, pulling himself back upright a beat later. Keeping up with Acheron at full speed was harder than he'd expected; the arbok was already panting, and the logs were bumping along under his belly so hard now that he was sure it'd leave bruises.

He was all the more relieved when they finally left the bridge behind—at least for a short time. Then lightning blinded him for seconds on end, and the accompanying thunder cracked so loudly and suddenly that he thought he felt his heart stop.

"We need shelter, now!" Ren said.

Acheron kept on running, and through the rain that stung his eyes, Syr noticed that the kwazai was headed for something that looked an awful lot like a solid stone wall. _Hurtling_ toward it. Syr panicked in spite of himself, struggling against the tether, and shouted when a hollow roar sounded over the storm.

"You can open your eyes now," Ren said.

Syr did so, only realizing then that he'd shut them. He looked up and saw the human slung over one of Acheron's shoulders. The kwazai was standing stock still with his free hand extended, and…

Syr promptly looked away. He didn't need to watch the black beam, bizarrely dark and bright at the same time, as it bored through the rock. Didn't need to think about what that energy did to flesh.

But he thought about it all the same.

"That'll do for now," Ren said before too long, and Syr finally let himself look at the tunnel. It was too dark to tell how deep it ran… but at least he could be sure it was unoccupied, freshly-dug as it was. Unless Acheron had dug into a pre-existing tunnel or cavern. Syr hissed at himself. _Not helping…_

White light filled the tunnel ahead, briefly illuminating Karo's silhouette. He turned himself around noisily. "Alre—" he began, but fell abruptly silent. A beat later, another loud peal of thunder sounded. "Ooh… yeah. Smart choice," he said.

"I need you to put up a block field around us," Ren said as Acheron carried him into the tunnel, Syr following close behind. "There's no guarantee this place won't collapse on us." The tunnel lit up again, red this time, as he recalled Acheron.

"Got it. C'mere," Karo said, and the others moved toward the sound of his voice now that Acheron was out of their way. He nudged Syr in the side. "Lucky you. You get to be awake for it this time."

Syr thought about responding to that, but words failed him when he felt an invisible force pressing in on him from all sides, forcing his jaws shut and making it difficult to breathe. Moments later, just as he began to feel faint, the pressure abated.

"There you go," Karo said.

"Thanks, buddy," Ren said, then sighed. "And now… we wait."

Syr wasn't even remotely inclined to argue. The rain was an impenetrable sheet outside, and soon the sky was flashing almost continuously, forcing him to screw his eyes shut. He wanted to keep moving, but for the time being, there seemed to be no other course but to wait out the storm. So he lay half-coiled and listened to it, wondering if the weather was this nasty back in Convergence. _I hope not._

By the time the thunderstorm finally ended, the sun had risen. "Guess we might as well go ahead and spend the night here. I mean day," Ren said, though none too happily. The storm had cost them an entire night's worth of travel, and his tone made it clear that he was anxious to get going again.

"Ah… about that," Karo began, and he sounded more than a little exhausted. Pained, even. "I… really oughta kill the block. Now, I don't _think_ that ceiling's gonna come down anytime soon, but." His arms pivoted audibly; the nosepass was shrugging, insofar as he could.

Silence. Then, "Mm. No. We'll find someplace else. Come on," Ren said, getting up to leave—and promptly smacking face first into an invisible barrier. He staggered and tumbled over backward, falling in a heap on top of Syr.

"Ah crap…" Karo shuffled all the closer to his trainer. "I am so, so sorry, holy crap. You okay?"

"Yeah," Ren managed, "yeah, I'm fine. If anything, I probably had that coming for working you so hard."

"Yeah, no. No you didn't. Now go find somewhere nice and take a nap. The block's down," Karo said. He pressed the tip of his nose to the button on one of Ren's capture balls, then turned into red light and vanished.

Ren remained sprawled over the arbok's side for a moment. Then another. And another. Syr began to wonder if the human had actually fallen asleep. Then he felt hands fussing with something at his chest. Right. The tether. He'd managed to forget it was even there.

Once it was off, Ren made for the exit, rolling up the belts and stuffing them into his backpack as he went. The arbok joined him outside, circling around to see his face past that hood. The human's eyes still looked like hell.

"Karo's right," Syr said. "You really should take a nap."

"Yeah." Ren might've been agreeing, but he sounded too distracted for Syr to be sure. He reached for his belt, maximizing a dusk ball in his palm, then let Acheron back out.

The kwazai immediately pulled a face at the light gray sky. "Bit ahead of schedule, aren't we?"

"Much the opposite." Ren gazed southward for a moment, then shrugged off his backpack again. After briefly rummaging through its contents, he pulled out a small and very full cloth pouch. He shook out a leppa berry, then tossed it to Acheron. The kwazai caught it in his jaws and promptly swallowed it.

"I'm… gonna stop for the day," Ren told him. "I promise. We just need to find a good spot to camp." He waved toward the forest at the foot of the mountain. "Somewhere in there will probably do. We'll need you to guard us. Karo's earned a break."

"Not a problem." The kwazai turned and began lumbering toward the trees.

"Oh… but no secret bases," Ren called after him.

Acheron stopped in his tracks, craning his neck back toward his trainer. Then he lowered his head. "No secret bases," he said, as warmly and assuringly as his rather ghastly voice allowed, and picked the human up.

Back into the forest. The woods were thicker this time around, but rain still filtered through the leaves above. An especially fat drop landed on Syr's snout and found its way right into his nose; he sneezed sharply, frightening something or another out of their perch nearby.

" _Gesundheit_ ," Ren said semi-absently.

"Go back to sleep," Acheron told him.

First came mild surprise that Ren had actually let himself doze off. Then came guilt at having awakened him. "Sorry," Syr said.

Acheron gave a dismissive wave. He began to slow down, eventually stopping at a clearing with enough open space for the three of them, provided they didn't lie too far apart. While the grass was still damp, the area wasn't as muddy as it could've been.

Not that Syr minded the mud all that much, provided it wasn't too deep. It felt kind of nice, actually, and the whole place smelled pleasantly of earth and rain and trees. But he doubted Ren would want it all over his clothes. Or his sleeping bag, for that matter.

But the sleeping bag didn't come out. Acheron slowly lowered himself to the ground, his legs folding underneath him, the human still cradled in one arm. "Shh," the kwazai said with a finger to his lips, and nodded downward. Ren had fallen asleep once more.

Not wanting to disturb him a second time, Syr went ahead and made himself as comfortable as he could. He took a minute or two to drink from a relatively clear puddle near his head, then lay the rest of himself down and closed his eyes. Before he knew it, he was out like a light.

"There he is!" a voice hissed from above, an hour or so after the others had gone to sleep. Acheron looked toward it, though he didn't need to. His tail had already detected two invisible pokémon up in the branches: a pair of kecleon, obviously intending to start something.

Whether the "he" the kecleon referred to was Syr, Ren, or someone else, Acheron hardly cared. For the first time since his gym days, he was awake at stupid o'clock with an important job to do, and damned if he wasn't going to do it.

He looked right at them with eyes and tail alike, baring his rows of daggerlike teeth. When that failed to scare them off, he raised a hand and conjured a black vortex around it.

" _Leave_ ," he said very quietly, in a voice befitting the undead.

The kecleon left.


	4. Bound to Happen

**Chapter 4 – Bound to Happen**

Jen gazed out the window, idly watching the passing cars as well as the people in the park beyond. He hoped, as he'd done more than once since waking, for a flash of light in the yard—for Solonn and Grosh to arrive early. They'd be a good source of conversation, judging by the time he'd spent with them previously. They could talk about Sinnoh, about the nation of snorunt and glalie and froslass that lived there and the tree-people they called neighbors. They could help him piece together more of his past. They could discuss a number of things that, Jen hoped, would help take his mind off his father's current whereabouts, if only for a while.

He'd tried not to worry too much about Syr in the time since the arbok had left for the south, but it was proving much too difficult. After all, his father was going up against the killers of an entire species.

 _The_ possible _killers,_ Jen told himself yet again, hoping as before to make Syr's task seem rather less insurmountable. Less dangerous. _I really shouldn't jump to conclusions,_ he added this time around. His father and the human and all the rest of them had seemed convinced that the deranics had pulled the figurative trigger, but for that matter, Jen had been convinced that Anomaly was nothing but an ordinary gardevoir.

Jen winced. His latest effort to calm his worries had just backfired. Now he had another concern on the brain: the fact that the same creature who'd abused his trust, tried to murder him, and destroyed his home was technically accompanying Syr on his mission. There was nothing between the nullshade and the arbok but a metal sphere and the strange process that converted people into portable energy.

Unconsciously, he lifted a claw to his mouth, gnawing at it as he wondered how inescapable those things really were. Anomaly's prison was one of the stronger models, according to Solonn and Grosh. But he knew firsthand how strong that creature was, and how ruthless…

" _Gah._ "

The unexpected noise startled Jen, causing him to accidentally nick his tongue with that claw. He hissed at the pain and stared confusedly at his hand for a moment, vaguely wondering when it had gotten anywhere near his face.

He turned toward the speaker and found Babs heading for the kitchen. "Did you fix it?" he asked as he followed her in.

"I wish, but no. I'm just remembering to take a break and eat for once," Babs responded. She swung the cupboard wide open and pulled out a half-empty bag of tiny, dead insects. "…Want any?" she asked as she removed the clip that held it shut.

Jen almost declined her offer, but then reconsidered. He wasn't particularly hungry, but it was a snack he hadn't tried before. A potential distraction from the things on his mind, however small. "Sure," he said, and slithered closer. He let Babs shake a few bugs out into his hand, prodded and examined them for a moment, then froze the lot of them and put them in his mouth.

"…Huh. They're not bad, I guess," he remarked a couple of moments later.

Babs chuckled. "Of course they're not. And they're loaded with energy, too. Which I'm gonna need, if that tube continues being such a stubborn little…"

\- o -

"Waaaake up. C'mon, sleepyscales."

It wasn't the first time Syr had heard the light, breathy voice in the past few minutes. But this time, he realized that the voice was coming from outside his current surroundings. From outside his dream.

He felt someone poking at him with what had to be at least seven fingers at once and finally finished waking up, lifting his head and releasing an enormous yawn that all but turned his face inside-out. His jaws popped back into place, and he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes with his tail so that he could assess the current situation.

Still in the forest, just as before. The wind had died down a little more, and more of the day's last light was filtering through the leaves than there'd been the past couple of evenings. It felt a bit warmer, too. Syr nodded in approval to no one in particular. If things really were clearing up, perhaps they wouldn't get stuck hiding from another thunderstorm.

The puddle was still at his side, though smaller than before. He lapped at it some more; it wasn't as cold this time, and more sediment had accumulated in it. Ren had his canteen out again, and Syr didn't doubt for a second that the human's water supply was tastier. Still, he held his tongue. Filter or no filter, no human could handle potentially contaminated water better than a poison-type could. Syr figured that if anyone ought to be rolling those particular dice, it was him.

Acheron was back in the ball, meanwhile, and Demi had taken his place in the clearing. "I'll be back in a few," she said, then strode off out of sight.

"Still not joining her, huh?"

Syr stopped staring off in the direction Demi had gone and met Ren's gaze. "Oh… No, I'm not hungry," he reminded him automatically. "I just ate last week."

"I know." Back into the pack the canteen went. "You're still not entirely comfortable with them, are you."

Syr was too embarrassed to answer at first. "Yeah," he finally admitted. "I'm trying, though. I'm trying to see Demi and Acheron when I look at them and not… you know. I know they're not going to hurt me. I know they had nothing to do with anything that happened last week. It just…"

"Happened _last week_ ," Ren said quietly. "Literally just a few days ago." He stood and approached the arbok, stepping in the puddle beside him but apparently not noticing. He put a hand against Syr's back. "For both of us. What I'm getting at is… I'm not taking it personally that you're still getting used to the twins. Neither are they. We _get_ it."

Of course. Of course they got it. Loss was at their tails as much as it was at his own—even moreso for Ren, who'd lost his entire race. Whose species would die out with him. And even though none of them had witnessed their personal tragedies like Syr had… God knew they could certainly imagine them. And sometimes imagining was a lot worse than knowing.

Something rustled in the distant branches, growing louder by the moment. Syr had very little time to wonder about it before a small group of mankey and vigoroth launched themselves into the clearing from above, claws and fists already glowing on a collision course with—

—Demi, who'd burst back out of the woods and thrown herself into the attackers' path before they could connect with their intended targets. An orange aura exploded off her skin, forcefully repelling the horde; a couple of them smacked audibly into the trees.

A mankey who'd avoided Demi's counter trap rolled out of the way of those who didn't, diving past the kwazai to charge at Ren. Syr lunged to catch the fighting-type, only to overshoot as an invisible force field caught the mankey short. He faceplanted into the damp soil, half-wondering exactly when Ren had found the time to let Karo out.

Syr started to get up, but he flattened himself against the ground once more at the sound of a reflux beam roaring through the air. Something landed on his back in nearly the same instant, knocking the breath out of him and slashing at his hood. Syr twisted himself about on instinct, his coils wrapping around his attacker: a vigoroth, he discovered. Once he could actually see the thing, the fangs went in. He tightened his grip as the venom went to work; within seconds, the vigoroth passed out.

Around that point, things became somewhat quieter. A quick look around told Syr that most of the attackers were down for the count, lying at the twins' muddy, bloody feet. The mankey who'd crashed into Karo's block field was the only one still awake, sprawled and groaning and cursing in front of the nosepass. Ren was crouching next to Karo, clutching him tightly.

"All right. Shift the field over to that mankey," the human said. "Don't let her get up, but make sure she can still talk."

Karo did as instructed. The mankey's eyes went wide. "Augh, no! Let _go_ of me!" she screeched.

"What, so you can put a crack in my nose? Not happening." Karo leaned toward her, staring down his nose. He let a couple of sparks crackle over it as he chuckled ominously.

"No, you've got some explaining to do," Ren told the mankey. "What was _that_ all about?" he demanded, indicating the fallen pokémon with a wave.

"Oh, like it even matters what I say to _you_." She rolled her eyes. "Stupid-ass human…"

"It matters," Ren said, earning a highly bemused look from the fighting-type, "because I'm sure you'd like to get this over with as soon as possible. Demi?"

At his prompt, Demi stepped up and lowered one of her hands onto the mankey's large, fuzzy head. Acheron joined her for good measure, bringing his head as close to their captive's eye level as he could and growling deep within his throat. A dark gray aura pulsed around him: shadow tag. Even if Karo lost hold of the block, the mankey wasn't going anywhere.

"A-ah… I'm not scared of you," the mankey said, and she couldn't have sounded less convincing if she'd tried. "We knew you wouldn't be alone. She said you had pokémon—"

"She?" Ren cocked his head. "Wouldn't happen to be a kecleon, now would she?"

The mankey gave him no response other than a wild stare, sweat dampening her fur. Demi gave her a little squeeze. "Ack! Okay, _yes,_ you typeless piece of crap, yes she was a kecleon. Said someone was running good people out of their homes around here—"

"That was _not_ her home," Karo said, half-snorting.

The mankey glared up at Karo. " _Running good people out of their homes_ ," she repeated, "and scaring the locals. She wanted you out of the area. We _all_ want you out of here." Her eyes darted to meet Syr's. "So why don't you just go back south with the rest of the snakes and leave us alone?"

 _Snakes?_ Syr could practically feel his trains of thought grind to a halt in unison, but his mind jolted back to work just as quickly. Suddenly all he could think of was the last time he'd seen snakes in the south…

"We didn't come from the south," Acheron told the mankey. "And we're not here to cause any trouble. We're just passing through."

The mankey scoffed. Her eyes traveled from Syr back to Ren and narrowed. "I don't believe you," she said simply, coldly.

"Okay," Ren said, rubbing at his temple, "okay. Demi?" he said again.

At this, Demi let loose a psybeam right in the mankey's face. The fighting-type's eyes rolled back, and she was out like a light.

"Bound to happen sooner or later," Ren muttered to himself.

Syr didn't follow at first, but then the rest of his mind began filtering back up through the stirred memories. No, he realized, he didn't need any clarification at all. He'd heard the sorts of things coming out of the mankey's unseen mouth.

Now that the last of the attackers had gone quiet, his own injuries were vying for his attention once more. His back stung now more than ever. "Ren? Could you…"

But Ren was already pulling max potions out of his backpack. He tossed one each to Demi and Acheron, then approached Karo with another pair of them tucked under his arm. "Need any?" he asked.

"Nah. But I'd sure like to get out of this mud." Karo grumbled wordlessly at the mushy ground for a moment before disappearing into the ball once more.

"You?" Ren asked Syr as he returned the great ball to his belt.

"Yeah." Syr turned his back to the human. Soon after, he felt the spray of medicine against his back. He hissed as the pain flared hotter for a moment, then relaxed as the wounds closed and it faded out completely.

"Let's get going," Demi said, crushing her empty potion bottle before stashing it back into the pack. "Before those three wake up."

Syr hadn't had time to count the attackers, but he could have sworn there'd been at least six. He tried not to dwell too much on what had happened to the other three.

"Agreed," Ren said, hesitating very briefly before recalling Acheron. He let Demi put the arbok's leash back on, then grabbed up their supplies.

Soon, they were southbound once more. But Syr's thoughts had a head start on them all. The distant past felt far less distant, and the fields and faces he'd abandoned were as clear in his mind's eye as if they lay right in front of him.

Before, Syr could only wonder if the ekans he'd helped save had stayed where he'd left them. Now he was all too certain that they had.


	5. Normal

**Chapter 5 – Normal**

"So. Snakes." Ren slowed down in midstep, possibly to glance back at Syr in vain. It was too dark to be sure. "Anyone you know?"

 _You knew he wasn't gonna let that slip past._ "Well… maybe," Syr said. "I used to live with several ekans, down around Rustboro. Maybe these are the same guys, but maybe not."

"Around Rustboro," Ren repeated. "You mentioned poison-types in that area being enslaved by the deranics."

"No, those were koffing," Syr said. _And at least one weezing._ That part couldn't quite make it out. "The ekans… I don't know what happened to them," he admitted. Very old guilt stirred somewhere in his stomach; he imagined it'd made it to his face, too. Certainly the kwazai in their midst was aware of it. He hoped she wouldn't pry.

"Well I sure as hell hope they made it out of there. For their sake and ours. They—"

"Incoming branch," Demi interrupted. "You'll both need to duck."

There was a little tug on the tether as Ren followed her advice. "No doubt they've had to deal with the deranics on some level," the human resumed. "They might know something useful."

Syr couldn't argue with that, silent as he dipped under the branch himself. And he sincerely preferred the prospect of seeing those ekans again as opposed to finding out they'd been captured or eradicated.

Whether or not they'd be equally glad to see him… that was another story.

Eventually the stars came back into sight, the trees and clouds both thinning. Soon they were mirrored by lights in the valley below. Syr and the others had known beforehand that Mauville still had power, owing to its considerable electric pokémon population; the place made the news in Convergence from time to time.

Even now, with the moon high overhead, there were signs of activity in the city below—not terribly many, but enough to reasonably assume they'd run into someone who knew the lay of the land. Someone who could guide them to supplies, and maybe even a roof to spend the coming day under.

 _And maybe,_ Syr thought, _someone else who knows about the ekans._ Someone who could give him an update on his former charges, who'd actually seen them since…

 _Since I left them to fend for themselves against the deranics._

He hissed softly, the guilt spiking again. It had been the ekans' decision to banish him. It had been his unwillingness to stand against Faurur that had convinced them he couldn't be trusted, though he still wasn't sorry for that, at least; he'd guessed, and correctly, that Faurur and her people were victims as much as anything else. And he didn't doubt that, outnumbered as he was, the ekans could've forced him out if he'd refused to go willingly.

But he hadn't had to run so far. No matter how deeply he'd feared and dreaded the possibility of fighting his oldest friend to the death… he could've stayed nearby, out of sight. Close enough to know if they truly needed his help more than Faurur needed his loyalty.

If anything had happened to them since, he couldn't help but feel responsible.

Ren undid the tether once more. Syr and Demi joined him at his sides, and together they descended the path to the city limits. An old visitor's center sat at the edge of town, dwarfed by much of the skyline. Light shone through its windows and glass roof, though it looked as though no one was actually inside. Just piles upon piles of junk. That was new; the last time Syr had been in this place, it had been entirely empty. Empty, and smelling of smoke.

The doors slid open, and the three filed in. Syr hissed as something prodded him sharply in the belly; scooting aside, he found a dull, spent revive crystal. It had apparently rolled free from a heap of the things near the entrance. Despite how cluttered the place was, his surroundings didn't stink in the least.

"Uh, hello?" Demi's tail was fanned out, and she was staring at the desk to the left as if she could see right through it. "Oh, good grief…" She smacked a couple of broken toys out of the way and slammed all four of her hands on the desk. "Hey! Wake up; you've got some visitors!"

"Hreh?" said someone out of sight. Demi stepped back, and a rather groggy looking linoone slowly sat up, eyes half-lidded for a moment before he snapped out of his doze. "Oh! Shoot, sorry about that. Must've forgot my midnight chestos. Uh… don't tell my supervisor, okay?"

"Not a single peep," Demi assured him, drawing fingers across her mouth as if zipping it shut. "We're just gonna stop here in town for the day, restock on a few things, and then be on our way. I assume that's not a problem?"

"Sounds reasonable enough," the linoone said. He sprang up onto the desk, his bushy tail knocking a couple of tv remotes onto the floor. He hopped down after them in the next moment and began slowly circling the new arrivals. "Well, we don't really have anything going on at the moment, and of course lots of folks are asleep… but hey, I think you'll enjoy your stay noneth—"

He paused right in front of Ren, his head tilted to the side. Sniffing the air, he sat back up, peering into the human's hooded face. A couple more sniffs; then, "Holy heck, are… are you…?"

"Am I what?" Ren responded. Though the linoone didn't seem hostile just yet, Syr could see the human tense up a bit.

The linoone shut his mouth, looking fairly disappointed. He slumped back onto all fours, averting his gaze. "…Oh," he said, pawing at one of the remotes and trying to look nonchalant. He didn't exactly pull it off. "Okay. Sorry; I just… never mind. It was just wishful thinking."

He looked back up at Ren. "Uh… word of advice: maaaaybe you should change outta that form, yeah? I mean, don't get me wrong; you did a heck of a job on it. But… well… I'd just… hate to see a lot of people getting false hopes, you know?"

Ren nodded, eyes closed. "I know. But… look, this is all I have left of him," Ren said, indicating his entire body with a sweep of his hands. "All _any_ of us have." His voice cracked, and it sounded awfully authentic. "I know it's been years now, but… please. Try to understand."

The linoone blinked, then looked away once more. "…I understand," he said quietly, clawing the linoleum guiltily. "Just, uh… hooooo." He shook his head a couple of times; his eyes were glistening with unshed tears. "Just be ready to explain yourself a few more times before all's said and done, okay?"

"Yeah. I'm used to that by now," Ren told him.

Another scrape at the floor. "Okay then, okay; I've held you guys up long enough. Looking for somewhere to stay a bit, yeah?"

"Yeah," Demi answered.

"All right, well your best bet's gonna be the old pokémon center. The doors are never locked and there's always someone behind the desk, same as the old days…" For a moment, the linoone's mind seemed to wander. "Anyway," he continued as he caught himself, "do you remember where that is, or…?"

Ren nodded, as did Demi.

"Thought as much." The linoone leapt back onto the desk. "Have a nice night," he said, then disappeared behind it.

"This way," Ren said, turning to lead the others down the street.

Some part of Syr's mind lingered back at the visitor's center. Just like that, the linoone had accepted that Ren was just another pokémon. Just a shapeshifter, preserving the legacy of their trainer any which way they could. He cast one more look back, then turned to Ren. "That went well."

"Yeah," Ren agreed. He didn't sound particularly happy about it.

The street they traveled was quiet and, apart from the three of them, empty. Syr spotted a car or truck every once in a while, but none of them were occupied. Wordlessly, Ren crossed the asphalt to one of the derelict vehicles; the others followed. With an effort, the human wrenched one of the doors open. The interior stayed dark, and a strong smell of neglect wafted out.

Ren leaned in slightly, frowning as his gaze fell to the floor. He bent to grab whatever he'd just seen and pulled it out. It was the steering wheel, or rather about a third of it, detached from its rightful place and riddled with chew marks.

Sighing, he tossed it back in. "Yeah no, this is in no state to function whatsoever."

"Most of them probably aren't," Syr said. "Cars, I mean. Not just here, but everywhere. A lot of pokémon find it faster or more convenient to travel the old-fashioned way. The ones who do use cars and buses and the like are mostly just hobbyists. People interested in the machines themselves."

Like Jen had been, prior to his evolution. And still was. His old convertible had been torched along with the house, but even if it hadn't been, it'd had a driver's seat modified for a snorunt and lacked accommodations for those without legs. He'd been preparing himself to give it up for a long time, but under a belief that had eventually proved false.

" _Of course, Adn told me he'd get me a new car after I evolved,"_ Jen had said. He'd tried not to sound disappointed, aware that was the least of the ways the ditto-in-disguise had betrayed them all, but his head had sunk low all the same.

 _Someday._ Someday Jen would get that new car, tailored to his new anatomy. Syr had promised it to Jen's face, and he promised it again, silently.

As if he needed any more reasons to try and come back in one piece.

The three set off again, passing plenty of lit windows with shadows moving inside; it seemed almost everyone was indoors at the moment, at least in this part of town. That was also new. Syr remembered the size of the crowd gathered around the pyres, all those years back. He doubted anyone in Mauville had gone indoors that day.

Along the way, they passed Mauville's gym, or what had once been the gym, at least. Now it was something more akin to a museum, a memorial, stocked with mementos and records of the city's lost human presence. It was one of Mauville's big draws, as far as Syr understood. Apparently it never closed, either; it was lit up right down to the old neon sign above the doors, through which a buizel emerged as they passed.

Ren moved a little closer to Syr, all the better to obscure himself behind the arbok's hood.

"I don't think he noticed you," Syr said.

"He didn't. He's too busy staring at you and me like he thinks we're gonna make a meal out of him." Demi craned her neck back to flash a smile at the buizel; Syr heard footsteps scurrying off into the distance in the next instant.

At length, they reached the pokémon center. Like the gym-turned-museum, it looked well-kept, the glass clean, the interior lights still relatively bright. The front doors immediately slid out of the way to admit the new arrivals; Syr hurried through before they could shut on his tail.

"Good evening," said a soft voice from across the room. Syr turned toward it and saw a blissey behind the desk. No sooner than their eyes met, a concerned look crossed her face… but she wasn't looking at Syr any longer. Her eyes were on Ren now, and she was already stepping out from behind her post to investigate further.

The blissey came to a stop in front of them, her dark eyes wide. She hesitated a moment, then reached up with a shaking paw toward Ren's face. "You can't be…"

Ren drew a deep breath. "I'm not," he said somberly.

Frowning, the blissey withdrew her paw. "Right," she muttered, "of course… I shouldn't have jumped to conclusions."

"Don't worry about it," Demi said, resting a hand on one of the blissey's ruffled shoulders. "You've got rooms available, right?"

"We do." The blissey looked the three of them over for a moment. "One for each of you, or…?"

"Just one for the three of us will do," Demi said.

"All right, then." The blissey turned toward the hallway. "4-B is free—that'll be the fourth door to your right," she clarified. No sooner had the words left her mouth than she glanced at Ren, looking a little sheepish. Apparently she'd only just remembered that one of her newest guests had used human-speech just minutes before.

"Thanks," Demi said coolly, then led the way. They reached their designated room within seconds. "You two get some rest," she said. "Someone should stay awake and keep watch."

"Someone should…" Ren agreed as he opened the door, though he was clearly leaving something unsaid.

Their room for the night, and much of the following day, was very tidy. Paintings of seaside towns and harbors decorated the walls, free from dust and grime. There was a neatly-made bed resting near the far wall, with a presently-open bathroom door set across from it.

Said bed was only really large enough for Ren, but Syr hardly cared. Even back at his own house (at what _used_ to be his house, he corrected himself automatically), he'd preferred the floor, with its ample room to coil up or stretch out as he pleased. There wasn't as much room here, but at least he didn't have to worry about flopping off of the bed.

Ren shut the door, then turned to face Demi, a dusk ball in hand. "You need your rest, too. I'll have Karo on sentry duty again."

Demi shrugged with all four shoulders. "Works for me," she said. One of her hands closed over her trainer's shoulder, squeezing gently. "Just make sure you get at least _some_ sleep, okay?"

"I'll do my best." Ren recalled Demi, then let Karo out.

The nosepass immediately crossed the room to investigate a wastebasket in the corner. "Yep. Plastic," he said, sounding relieved.

There was a _flumpf_ from behind the two of them. Ren had just tossed himself onto the bed, from the sound of it. Sure enough, there he was, lying fully clothed on still-made sheets and staring at the nearest painting.

"It's so… normal." The human gave a weak laugh. "Look at this place. It's like…" He rolled onto his side, facing the wall. "…Like nothing happened."

Neither of the pokémon said anything in reply for moments on end. The silence was eventually broken by Karo's heavy, muffled steps across the carpet. He stopped at Ren's bedside. "Hey…" he said.

More silence.

"…Uh… yeah," Karo said awkwardly. "I'm gonna be here all day, all right? To block if you need it. Like if somebody barges in and chucks a poké ball at you or something."

Now that was an image. "What? Why would anyone do that?" Syr wondered aloud.

"To see if I really am a pokémon," Ren answered, still huddled up and staring at the wall.

"It'd be interesting to see how that turned out," Karo said, and there was a definite eagerness in his voice.

"It'd bounce off me and leave a bruise, and I'd tell them I kept my trainer's ball," Ren muttered.

Karo gave another of his pseudo-shrugs. Syr was used to this sort of thing from the nosepass; as long as he'd known him, Karo had insinuated that Ren wasn't human every chance he got. All the same, Syr was a little surprised that Karo was keeping up the act now that his trainer had returned safe and sound. Was it merely habit at this point, or did Karo genuinely believe that being human and being alive were still mutually exclusive?

"Just don't fall asleep, all right, Karo?" Syr hadn't forgotten the last time Karo had done so. Although, he acknowledged, they did have more options this time; this was, after all, a pokémon center. There might still be a few old awakenings lying around.

"Wouldn't dream of it," Karo responded. There was a moment's silence. Then he burst out laughing, at which Ren and Syr both jolted.

"Hey, keep it down in there, will ya?" someone demanded from the room next door.

Karo's laughter crumpled into indecent-sounding snorts and then died out entirely. "Sorry," he said, though he didn't quite sound the part, "sorry…"

"It's okay," Syr told him. "We could probably use a few good laughs, to be honest." He saw Ren lift his head from the pillow only to lay it right back down.

For lack of any other ideas, Syr decided to do similarly. He nudged the wastebasket upright again, pushing it back into the corner to free up as much room as he could, then lay down, drawing his head in close to his side. As an afterthought, he groped around the wall with the end of his tail until he found the lightswitch. Off it went, plunging the room into darkness apart from the soft pink nightlight mounted next to the door.

Syr curled up, shutting his eyes, but his mind kept going. Not for the first time, he kind of wished he could laugh things off as easily as Karo could. As it was, he was a captive audience to all sorts of reminders of his current situation—even the carpet under his scales made it impossible to pretend he was somewhere else. This wasn't his own home, or even the floor at Ren's house. Jen wasn't in the next room, or the room after that, or anywhere nearby at all. This was a dark little room in Mauville, in the middle of what might be a one-way trip.

 _Please let me see my son again,_ he prayed, and lay awake for nearly two hours afterward.


	6. The Serpents Acknowledged

**Chapter 6 – The Serpents Acknowledged**

There was a creak, then a click. With a delay, Syr registered light shining beyond his eyelids.

"This should cover it," Demi said from somewhere nearby. "Just let me know if it doesn't."

Syr raised his head a few moments after, yawning, and found Ren sitting upright on the bed, munching on a granola bar and looking deep in thought. Karo still stood next to the bed and was now leaning back—the mattress had slipped a few inches closer to the wall as a result—and looking up at Demi, who stood in the open doorway with a stuffed cloth sack hanging off one shoulder.

"Hrm," Ren eventually said, with an acknowledging nod toward Demi. He soon finished eating and got up off the bed, crumpling the now-empty wrapper and tossing it in the trash on his way to the adjacent bathroom. The sound and smell of a running shower soon followed.

"Poor guy's wasting his time," Karo said. "His clothes still smell."

"They don't have to." Demi set the bag on the floor, then carefully stepped over Syr and knocked on the bathroom door. "Ren?" She stood there listening for a moment, then knocked louder. "Hey, Ren!"

"What?" he shouted over the running water.

"They've still got the laundry room up and running. Mind if I go wash your things?"

"No. Just a moment…"

The faucet stopped, and Syr heard the human's wet footsteps slapping across linoleum. A moment later, the door opened just a crack and a human arm emerged, clutching a wad of clothing.

"I'll be back as fast as I can," Demi assured him, then left for the laundry room.

The shower cycled on once more. Syr turned his attention to Karo, who was now nosing through the sack Demi had left behind. "Oh man!" the nosepass said. "Dude, she found _belues_!"

Syr watched as Karo tipped the bag over, pulling it away from its contents with a featureless hand. The nosepass began greedily sorting the bulbous blue berries from the rest of the food. "I don't think those were all for you, Syr said.

"Oh, yes they are," Karo said. "Demi knows I love these things. Besides, look: there's plenty of other stuff, and it's mostly just Ren that needs it, right?" Without giving Syr a chance to answer, "Right."

Supposing he couldn't argue, Syr mindfully looked away. The noises Karo made while eating were bad enough. He didn't need to watch it again.

A few minutes later, the bathroom door swung partway open. Remembering that Demi still had Ren's clothes, Syr averted his gaze a second time.

Karo snorted in amusement. "Relax, man. He's got a robe on."

Cautiously, Syr turned to confirm it. Yes, Ren was wearing a bathrobe. Syr was thankful, though much more for Ren's sake than for his own. Syr had never known a human who'd liked to be seen naked.

Before long, Demi was back with Ren's clothes. The human dressed in the bathroom, returned to pack up the supplies, and then recalled Karo. It would be kind of odd, Syr acknowledged, if a pokémon left the room who hadn't walked in in the first place. "Onward, then," Ren said, pulling his hood back up over his bald head.

The three of them emerged into the lobby to a view of the setting sun through the glass doors. Not long after they'd checked out, there was an odd sound, like something smacking against flesh.

"Very funny," Demi said.

A backward glance told Syr that she'd caught a poké ball of all things, the distinctive colors peeking through her long fingers. In the middle of the lobby stood a chansey who was looking more than a little guilty.

"…Sorry." That wasn't the chansey, but rather the blissey behind the receptionist counter. Her paw was as close to her face as it could get, embarrassment all over her expression. "She just… wanted to be sure."

"It wouldn't have worked," Ren said hollowly, without looking back. He was already stepping through the doors. "I still have my poké ball."

Demi still had the one the chansey had thrown, meanwhile, and was examining it between two fingers. "Hmm. I wonder if this thing's unregistered."

"Unlikely," Ren said. But he held out a hand all the same, collecting the ball from her and stuffing it into the pack as he passed through the front doors. Once they'd left the pokémon center well and truly behind, Demi returned to her dusk ball, and out came Acheron.

The streets were a little busier this time around, though still devoid of any moving vehicles. As Syr had expected, it was mostly electric-types running about; he counted more electrike and manectric in particular than anything else. Some of them stopped what they were doing to watch the strangers go past, but none engaged them directly.

Soon the sun dropped completely out of sight, and the streetlights began shining down on them. After days of traveling through near total darkness, it was a nice change, at least as far as Syr was concerned. That luxury would likely be left behind in Mauville, though. Then it'd be back to the tethers.

"Hm," Ren spoke up. "Sounds like the fountain's still running."

Sure enough, Syr picked out the sound of running water over the songs of bug-types and the crackling of electric-types at play. He could smell the water, too, very fresh and inviting. River water and puddles of muddy rain were fine and all, but the fact of the matter was that the clean sort tasted better.

 _We're not stopping for a drink until we need to,_ he chided himself.

And then stopped anyway.

There was another scent on the air. A familiar scent.

 _Snakes._

His own kind, moreover.

The others noticed he'd stopped and did likewise. "What…" Ren began, but fell silent once he'd followed Syr's gaze.

Across the expanse of grass between the fountain and the three of them, a dark shape was slithering closer. Another arbok was staring at the three of them now, her brow furrowed with uncertainty as she approached. Then her eyes widened.

"…Syr?"

Syr searched the face before him, trying to put a name to it, to no avail. _She must have evolved after I left._ "I'm sorry, but…" he began awkwardly.

Thankfully, she seemed to pick up on his unspoken question. "I'm Iph," she told him. "Do you remember me? I remember you."

 _Ah._ Syr had never known her all that well. She'd been one of the younger ekans; as such, she'd mostly kept to those her own age. "Yeah," he said anyway. "I remember."

"I'm surprised to see you again," Iph said. "We saw you head north, but…" She shook her head, perhaps trying to clear it of something unwelcome from the past. "I'm just thankful you're all right."

A laugh escaped Syr, surprising even himself. " _You're_ glad _I'm_ all right? I could say the same thing about you!" It was as if a dam had broken. All at once, the relief and gratitude and realization of just how much he'd _missed_ his old charges came rushing in. Tearing up, he moved forward, bowing his head. He felt another scaly forehead join it after a beat.

"I'm just so, so glad you're all right," Syr said, feeling tears slide down his snout. Then something fell into place within his mind, something heavy and cold. This was only one arbok. He lifted his head once more. "Wait… where's everyone else?"

Iph sighed. The relief Syr had seen on her face all but drained out. "They're with Basath," she answered, "watching the kids and the nest. Syr… only four of us made it out of there alive."

The weight in his mind fell into his stomach, hard. _Only four._ There'd been more than twice that many when he'd left them. There might still be if he'd gone back south sooner.

Sick with guilt, he averted his gaze. "I'm sorry," he said, his voice shaking. The tears kept falling, running down his chest and into the grass. "God, this is all my fault; I shouldn't have—"

"It wasn't you," Iph insisted.

Hesitantly, Syr met her gaze again. She was looking at him with more pity than sorrow now.

"It wasn't you," she repeated. "It was the deranics."

"Of course it was."

Ren's voice immediately grabbed Iph's attention. It honestly seemed as though she'd only just properly noticed the unfamiliar faces flanking Syr. More to the point, she'd finally noticed the uncannily human figure in her midst.

She gawked for a moment, her mouth hanging open. She shut it again with an effort, then leaned in toward Ren; Acheron responded with a warning growl. Iph flinched, but didn't pull back, merely flicking her tongue out a few times, all but licking Ren at that distance. If the human was bothered by this, he gave no indication.

She finally withdrew, her eyes flitting about as if seeking an explanation. Finally she relaxed, resigned. "Vela always said there had to be at least some of you left," she said.

"You mentioned the deranics," Ren pressed on. "Have you seen them? Have you fought them?"

Iph twitched in surprise again at the sound of the human voice, the human language, but composed herself more quickly this time. "Not directly. Their koffing and weezing tracked us down, swarmed us, tried to take us by force. They didn't take any of us alive. We didn't let them."

More leaden guilt. They'd stood their ground, same as Syr once had… before the enemy'd had his friend's faces. Laid down their lives, when he hadn't even been able to raise a fang against Faurur and her people.

"We're going to deal with them," Ren said. "We're going to make them pay."

Iph smiled at him, however weakly. "That's very noble of you. Mad, maybe, but noble."

"If there's anything you can tell us about them," Ren said, "anything that'll prepare us for what's to come…"

Iph inhaled deeply, flexing her hood. "Right, of course… Follow me."

Off she went, deeper into the park, leading them past benches and bicycle racks that were covered in leaves and vines and a few stubborn flakes of paint. Soon, they reached a large playground. Apart from the fountain, this was the only part of the park Syr had seen so far that wasn't overgrown. Monkey bars and twisted swings and a multi-tiered metal cage in the shape of a rocketship stood in an island of gravel, free from ivy…

And there, coiled around or draped over the playground equipment, were three other arbok, none of whom Syr recognized. There was also a pair of very young-looking ekans, who were peeking out from inside a crawl tube, plus a lone seviper.

The seviper was the first to notice they had company. She rose to attention at once; the rest of the serpents followed her gaze, and one of them gasped as the arbok all hurried to the seviper's sides. The two ekans tried to join them; a fretful hiss from one of the arbok sent the hatchlings back into hiding.

"You're Syr, aren't you," the seviper said.

Syr blinked stupidly for a moment, wondering how she knew his name; as far as he could recall, he'd never spoken to a seviper even once in his life. But his ignorance extinguished itself before he could ask. _The other ek—the other arbok must've told her about me._

Imagining their talk of him must have been unfavorable, "…Yes," he admitted.

"Hm." The seviper craned her neck, trying to meet Acheron's gaze. "And you…" There was a note of amazement in her voice. "…Esaax?"

"Nope," Acheron said.

Meanwhile Syr's mouth had gone dry. He could explain how the stranger knew _him_ just fine, but how in the _hell_ …

 _Basath._ With everything else on his mind, he'd almost failed to register the fact that Iph had used that name. Now it clicked firmly into place, raising a cloud of recent memories.

" _You never got to meet her, though, did you?"_

One of the old crew, Esaax had called her. One of Jessie's pokémon, then, or James's, caught after Syr and Faurur's departure. Esaax hadn't said much else about Basath…

…Other than the fact that she apparently hated him.

That sick feeling intensified, dread joining the guilt. Syr dearly hoped that Basath wouldn't delve any deeper into the Esaax topic than she already had. _If she goes off on him…_

"Excuse me," one of the arbok next to Basath said, "but am I the only one who notices _there's a human_ over here?"

"No, you're not." One of the other arbok was staring at Ren with tension written all over her posture. "Basath, we need to go," she said.

"Vela, don't." Iph's tone suggested that she had to say that often. She mindfully put herself between Ren and Vela. "He's not like the ones who caged us, all right? He wants to help us."

Basath finally pried her eyes off of Syr, locking onto Ren as Iph moved out of the way once more. "Help us," the seviper repeated. "How so?"

"The deranics need to pay," Ren said. "For what they've done to my people and to yours."

Two of the arbok exchanged glances. Vela was busy shooing the ekans away. ("But I wanna see the human!" one of them protested.) She hastily shepherded the children toward a large, fake tire lying on its side; once they disappeared into the middle of it, she went right back to eyeing the unexpected guests with clear distrust.

"Is that really what this is about?" Vela asked. She looked Syr right in the eye with such fierceness that he momentarily feared she was trying to paralyze him. "Or are you headed down there to join forces with _him_?"

"Vela…" Iph groaned.

"He was never willing to stand up to that nasty old weezing before," Vela went on. "If he makes it down there and tells Farrer where we are, he's going to come up here with the rest of his gasbags and—"

"Faurur is dead," Syr blurted out. Vela's mouth closed with a delay. Syr's own words rang in his mind and settled thickly in his throat, making it hard to continue."She had a xatu bring her up—" Iph and another of the arbok visibly shuddered at the mention of the psychic-type. "—to say goodbye to me." _And Esaax,_ he almost said, but caught himself short.

"She also came to warn us about the deranics," he said, at which Vela openly scoffed.

"Enough," Basath said, glaring pointedly at Vela; the latter drew back a bit, very slightly embarrassed. "Now. Let me get this straight: Faurur turned tail and deserted the deranics?"

"Yes," Syr said. The end of his tail flicked about irritably; it was all he could do not to launch into an earnest tirade about his late friend's trustworthiness. "She found out they've been lying to her colony. Hiding something… something big. Something that's already affected the entire world."

"Something that happened about a decade and a half ago," Ren said. "I should hope I don't need to spell it out for you."

Basath and her friends kept silent for a few moments. "You're going to take on a bunch of creatures who destroyed almost an _entire species_." She went back to staring at Syr as she spoke. "And the living bombs who serve them. _You_."

"They do have a psychic-type on their side," the small male to Vela's left said.

" _One_ psychic-type," Vela countered. "Singular."

"Look," Ren said. "We're not planning to rush in, guns blazing. We know we're outnumbered. We know we still have no idea what deranics actually _are_ , let alone every single kind of technology they might have at their disposal. What we _do_ know is they've developed some kind of superweapon, or something similar. That's our target. We need to get whatever it is out of their hands before they can use it again. If we're successful…" His voice trembled with something barely restrained. "Maybe we can turn it against them."

"And then destroy it," Acheron put in quickly, before anyone could jump to conclusions about their further intentions for the thing.

Basath shook her head. "Look. I don't like to say this to anyone, but. Honestly?" She shook her head again. "You don't have a chance in hell."

"Basath. What about Verdanturf?" Iph said. "If the rumors are true…"

Vela snorted. "Good luck with that," she muttered.

"Rumors? What rumors?" Ren asked.

"Talk of weird things happening in those parts," Basath answered. "Possibly psychic things. We don't know for sure—we've given the area a _very_ wide berth, just to be safe. We can't risk the eggs and children."

"If there are psychics there," Iph said, "and if these guys can get them on board…"

"Two ifs," Basath said. She looked to be deep in thought. "At least."

"It's worth investigating," Acheron said, folding his arms. "More psychics on our side would tip the odds a little more in our favor. And if they turn out hostile, well." Black vorteces whirled around his fists for a moment. "We can handle them. _I_ can handle them."

"And you said they were around Verdanturf, right?" Syr asked. There was hope in his voice and his eyes despite the fact that if Iph was right, he'd be crawling right into a den of creatures whose mere _presence_ could be sickening, depending on the species. Verdanturf was right there on the route they'd planned to take. If the psychics were willing to join them…

"Right," Basath answered him. Then she sighed. "Syr?"

Syr flinched; was she about to lecture him on how awful another of his dead friends was? "Yes?"

"I wasn't there when you bailed on these guys before," she said. "Maybe I've had no right to judge you for it… but that hasn't stopped me from doing so." She leveled another hard stare into his eyes. "I just couldn't stand the fact that not only one but _two_ of her pokémon turned out to be such cowards. She deserved so much better…"

"I…" Syr faltered. He bowed his head. "…Yeah. Maybe you're right about me. But Esaax wasn't a coward."

"He abandoned us when she died," Basath went on, and there were tears at the corners of her eyes. "Right when we all needed each other the most, he just… ran away." Another shake of her head. "But… look, this isn't about him. It's about you. I wish you'd had the guts you have now back before you left these guys. Back before the koffing started breeding out of control. But… well." She gave him a rueful expression that was almost a smile. "Better late than never, I guess."

She moved back a few feet, then inclined her head toward the southwest. "Go check 'em out," she said. "We'd join you ourselves if we didn't have a nest to look after." Another jerk of her head, toward the tire this time, where the ekans sat watching the adults; Syr supposed the eggs were hidden there. "After that…"

Basath trailed off, apparently uncomfortable with sharing their plans beyond that. She looked to Ren again. "I don't suppose there's anything I can say or do to convince you to stay with us, is there."

"I can think of a couple of things," Ren said. He nodded toward her long, red-tinged fangs, then toward her bladed tail. "My friends would make you regret it, though."

"Damn right, we would," Acheron said.

The seviper gave another of those sad near-smiles. "I wouldn't even consider it. Just… watch your back, would you? All of you, but especially you, human. Best of luck to you," she said. "You're gonna need it."

"Thank you," Ren said, followed by, "Come on." He turned away from the seviper and her friends, waving for his teammates to follow. Syr glanced back at the serpents in the playground more than once as he complied, Basath's somewhat backhanded endorsement still echoing in his head. Some part of him couldn't help but think that maybe she'd have had just a little more faith in his party if it hadn't included him.


	7. Verdanturf

**Chapter 7 – Verdanturf**

It was close to midnight before the three of them left Mauville behind. The path to Verdanturf would be rather shorter than the road to Mauville had been, and what awaited them at its end remained a mystery. Basath and the arbok hadn't seen the inhabitants of Verdanturf for themselves. All they'd had to go by was a rumor, one that had meant potential danger for the serpents at the time but potential hope for everyone now.

The tethers were back in the pack for this leg of the journey. They weren't needed—the route connecting Mauville and its neighbor to the west was almost as well-lit as the city behind them, at least for the time being. Local volbeat and illumise had apparently chosen that night for a get-together; their lights, though flickering, were enough for the entire party to see by.

Syr and Acheron immediately tried to flag them down for information about the rumored psychic presence ahead, but not a single one paid them any mind, no matter how much noise they made. Acheron plucked a volbeat right out of the air and the bug-type simply kept beating his wings, apparently unaware that he wasn't actually moving.

The kwazai shook his head. "They're dead to the world," he determined as he let the volbeat go. "The air's too thick with their pheromones. If we were all volbeat and illumise, we might be able to grab their attention for more than a split-second, but as it stands…"

Syr glanced at the disused daycare center as they passed it by, presently covered in ivy and flashing insects. For just a moment, he wondered what the buildings of Verdanturf would look like. Then it was right back to contemplating its inhabitants.

"They might not be psychics," he thought aloud.

"No, they might not," Acheron agreed. Ren nodded in concurrence.

"They could be ghosts," Syr went on, with a frown toward the part of him that perked up in hope at the possibility. __Psychics can deal a bigger blow against the koffing. You know that.__

"Ghost, dark, fairy," Acheron said, counting each type off on his fingers. "Possibly fighting, or even dragon. And those are just the likeliest suspects after psychics.

"We can probably handle them, though, whatever they are," he added. "And that's __if__ they decide to give us a hard time. Maybe they—"

Another volbeat practically divebombed the party, whooping and shouting and clearly oblivious to the presence of anyone outside his own kind. "Watch it!" Acheron snapped. He shook his head and sighed as the bug arced back into the air above.

Eventually, the flashing light of the swarming bug-types fell behind the three of them, replaced by the lights of the town as they closed the remaining distance. Verdanturf, it seemed, still had some electricity to its name, too, albeit markedly less than Mauville boasted. As they drew nearer, Syr could make out scattered functioning streetlamps, casting less light than was ideal but probably—hopefully—enough to keep the tethers packed away. Being able to move about freely—to dodge, to flee, as shameful as the latter notion felt—seemed like a very good idea under these circumstances.

There were no volbeat or illumise gathered on the rooftops here, but apart from that Verdanturf was highly reminiscent of the daycare he'd seen earlier, and then some. More leaves and vines covered these walls than any others he'd seen; he suspected that grass-types, first and foremost, had inherited this town.

Which could mean good news about the psychics—if that's what they were. Most of the grass-types he could name were also poison-types. If they wanted anything to do with this place, surely they weren't getting a hard time from their psychic neighbors.

That was the best-case scenario: psychics he could tolerate, like the twins.

 _ _Like Esaax.__

Syr didn't have to battle the thoughts that brought on for long. Something dark caught his eye from a couple of blocks down the street, something bobbing in midair. A very familiar scent reached him, burning his nose and tongue, and alarms went off inside his head.

"Koffing!" he shouted. "There's a—"

No. Not one koffing, he realized in horror. Dozens of them, filtering in from around the vine-covered houses. He only had a moment's glimpse of them before the smoke and smog they emitted blotted them from view.

 _ _They've found us. They've already found us!__

Syr's mind raced, threatening to distract him. His eyes stinging badly, he drew himself into a coil, flexing his jaws and letting his fangs swing forward, ready to strike. One of them could burst out of the smokescreen at any moment…

"Acheron?" he called out. He couldn't see or smell either of the others through the pollution. He couldn't even feel their movements through the ground. There was no way of telling where they were or if they were all right. "Acheron! Ren!" He broke into a momentary coughing fit, feeling his eyes flood with tears. " _ _Anyone__!"

With his vision blurred, he could only just make out a disturbance in the smoke in front of him. Something big, at least compared to the koffing. There was a moment's hope that it was one of his allies… but the shape that emerged from the dark clouds was unmistakably a weezing's.

"Syr…"

He could have sworn his heart stopped dead, right then and there. He knew that pair of voices.

"Don't make me hurt you. __Please__."

 _ _No…__ This wasn't possible. Faurur had burnt down to smoke and cinders right before his eyes. "You're… you're not real…" he managed, his chest tightening painfully. "You're __not real__!"

With his eyes screwed tightly shut, Syr lunged. His jaws snapped shut on empty air—

—and just like that, the smoke was gone.

But so was Verdanturf.

His surroundings were far more artificial now. The plantlife blanketing the walls was replaced by flashing readouts over illuminated keyboards, and there was still no sign whatsoever of the others. His hands were shaking in front of— _ _Hands?__ He stared at them in utter disbelief. A kwazai's hands. A kwazai's body. __His__ now.

Syr saw his skin turn pitch black… and then it wasn't __his__ skin anymore. The kwazai collapsed as Syr rose above him—and then Syr was flying, shooting through the room like a bolt of lightning amid showers of sparks and ice beams lancing past—

A dead, sudden stop.

It was brighter now. The walls were partly crystalline. He was lying on his back, on something cool and soft… he had a body again. But it still wasn't his own. He had legs again. Shuddering, he tried to raise his head and look at himself… but he was too weak to do anything but lie there and shake.

He felt something approach at the head of his bed, or whatever it was. Sensed it, in a way he couldn't even name. A red hand moved into view, descending toward his chest—

—He was upright again. Surrounded by __glalie__. Terror struck deep, and he tried to scream, but no sound came out. He couldn't even open his mouth to strike as the glalie rushed around him, hissing and snapping their guillotine teeth, their eyes burning blue…

A tremor started somewhere deep inside him. It intensified rapidly. Painfully. He still couldn't scream.

There was a blinding glow, and a deafening noise, and a fleeting sense of being ripped apart from the inside—

—and just like that, reality returned, so hard and so fast that he didn't dare believe it at first. But as his heart slowed, his breaths no longer stinging, he finally trusted his eyes, his nose, everything else. He was back in Verdanturf. Back in his own, limbless body.

And he was no longer alone.

There was Ren, visibly shaken. There were also a number of unfamiliar shapes scattered about—misdreavus, Syr realized a beat later, all lying unconscious on the cracked pavement. There was a mismagius, as well. He lay almost motionless at Acheron's feet, glaring weakly but balefully up at the kwazai.

" _ _Ffffeh__. You are no fun whatsoever," the ghost croaked, before Acheron silenced him with a reflux attack. The kwazai stepped back from the mismagius, his shoulders heaving as he panted. He took a moment to spit on the ghost, then went back to grimacing in pain as he strode over to his trainer's side.

"That had better be the last of them," Acheron said, sounding winded, before his legs crumpled underneath him.

Meanwhile Ren had managed to open his pack despite how unsteady his hands were. One of them emerged clutching a bottle of max potion. He set about treating Acheron, all while trying to calm his own breathing.

With something of an effort, Syr joined the two of them. "I think… that might have been them," he said, lowering his head in dismay. "I think __they__ were the ones Basath and the arbok heard about."

Ren nodded, but he looked distracted. His hands were under his hood, massaging his temples. "It felt so real," he murmured. "Too real."

"Some of those weren't even __our__ memories," Acheron said. "I saw you through my sister's eyes. I had her hands."

"They put me through one of Karo's memories." There was no doubt about it. That had been the glalie they'd faced in the Hope Institute, her and all her double team clones. That had been the explosion that had finally banished her illusions, experienced from a first-person perspective. If he hadn't already hoped that Karo wouldn't need to explode again, that would've done it.

As for the other foreign memories… those, he couldn't even begin to identify.

Ren took another deep breath, then another, and then motioned for Acheron to help him up. "We should get moving," he said, "before the ghosts wake up."

No one argued with that. As soon as everyone was back upright, they were off down the street once more. Half expecting another ambush, another reality shift, Syr's gaze swept back and forth over the silent, green city, staring as deep into the darkness as he could. His tongue flicked in and out rapidly, again and again and again, tasting the air for smoke or anything else out of the ordinary.

But nothing of the sort came. None of his senses reported anyone around, indoors or out. The kwazai gave no indication that he sensed anything, either. Not a single soul crossed their path, ghost-type or psychic-type or any other, and before Syr knew it, the sky was beginning to lighten and the entrance to the tunnel out of town was right there in front of them.

 _ _There's still hope,__ he told himself. __Maybe they're in the tunnel.__

The tethers came back out. Acheron took the leading end this time, and the three of them proceeded into the tunnel.

It smelled like it always had, as far as Syr could remember: cold, damp, and populated by whismur. Maybe a loudred or two. Nothing stood out.

He could hear hushed conversation coming from the shadows. The locals knew they had company. The rational part of Syr's mind knew that he and his companions could certainly take on a bunch of whismur, loudred… probably even exploud, if it came to that. The rest'd had quite enough action for one night.

Faurur's faces flashed across his mind. An image of Esaax followed, from the same top-down perspective as the time before. A shudder ran from his head to his tail, and a tug at his chest told him he'd stopped in his tracks.

He'd had quite enough action for a long, long time. But he had to keep going.

Thankfully, the tunnel's inhabitants kept to themselves. The light at its end grew closer, brighter, until finally Syr and the others were standing under a clear morning sky.

Not far ahead, there was a small building with relatively dark and broken windows. A break room for people who'd worked in the tunnel, if Syr remembered right. Now… well. Now it could be serving any purpose.

Ren let go of Acheron's hand and waved the kwazai forward. As quietly as he could, Acheron approached the house, peering through the windows with eyes and tail alike. Moments later, he turned to face the others, giving a thumbs-up.

Ren murmured something that sounded more or less like, "Good." He made his tired way to the door, which Acheron was holding open for the two of them.

Syr followed the human into the dimly lit space beyond. The smell of dust was thick in the air; it drifted in the sunbeams, and Syr could feel himself carving a path at least a quarter-inch deep in the layer that covered the floor. A wooden table, minus one leg, sat slightly off-center in the room, surrounded by a few dirty cushions. In the corner behind it, there was an open refrigerator, and Ren was staring at it.

"Acheron? The fridge."

Acheron strode past, stepping over the table. With a grunt, he pulled the refrigerator from its corner, cords trailing behind it, and dragged it outside.

"Those cabinets, too," Ren added.

Bowing his head, the kwazai re-entered and removed more of the offending furniture; the reason why finally registered in Syr's brain as he watched Acheron work. This was being done for Karo's sake.

"What about the sink, though?" Acheron asked on his second return trip.

"That…" Ren sighed. "Well, I know where I'll be sleeping."

Acheron merely shrugged at that, then nodded toward his dusk ball. In went the kwazai, and out came the nosepass.

The moment he materialized, Karo made an odd, lunging motion toward the metal sink as if pulled by an invisible hand. He forced himself still with a shudder. "Uh… Ren?"

"I know," Ren said. "Don't worry about fighting it this time. I'll bring this over." He stooped and grabbed a cushion. "Just focus on the block."

The nosepass made a contented sort of humming sound. "That is __such__ a relief. You have no idea." With that, he waddled over to the side of the room. He turned to the left—involuntarily, from the looks of it—and the right side of his nose plastered itself to the sink with a __clang__ that made both Ren and Syr wince.

"Wow. That was loud," Karo remarked, then snorted. "Heh, don't worry, though. I'll keep the whismur and whatnot at bay."

Ren nodded silently. He sat down next to Karo, laying the dusty cushion on the floor.

"…Wait." Syr circled the table and carefully grabbed the cushion with his lips, careful not to let his fangs pierce it. His snout scrunched up around it—it tasted nasty—but he resisted the urge to spit it back out just yet. He bashed it against the wall, again and again and again, a gray cloud bursting from it each time. Once it seemed as clean as it was going to get, he gave it back to Ren.

The human murmured something else, presumably thanking him. He lay down and seemed to pass right out the instant his head hit that cushion.

Unable to fend off his own exhaustion anymore, Syr collapsed into a heap… but his mind kept going. He silently begged it to shut down, even though he doubted his dreams would be any better than the memories of Verdanturf replaying unbidden again and again.

By and large, they weren't.


	8. Systems Online

**Chapter 8 – Systems Online**

They stood by, their consoles arranged in a ring around a modestly-sized stage. Their eyes were trained on maps, on readouts, on the thing that sat like an oversized seedpod in the center of the room. Faces looked back from a few of the pits dotting its surface: some adoring, some puzzled.

Four-pronged tongues, dark and prehensile, jabbed at keys and flicked at switches. Something creaked overhead. Lights powered on around the metal iris that was the ceiling before it cycled open.

The seedpod hummed to life, rising slowly. A pale green glow surrounded each of its occupants, who murmured to themselves and one another in excitement.

Less than two hours remained. 

\- o - 

" _Jen! Holy crap, get in here; you have to see this!"_

The voice over the intercom didn't sound worried. On the contrary, Babs sounded positively elated. Figuring she must've made some major breakthrough with regards to the tube, Jen hurried to the elevator. Once in the lab, he navigated the off-white corridors with relative ease, fairly familiar with the layout at this point… but even if he hadn't been, he would've guessed that the peculiar light coming from down the hall marked his destination.

The room with the tube was much more than large enough to contain him. All the same, he hung in the doorway as if frozen there, eyes and mouth wide open. As far as he could tell, the tube had vanished entirely. There was a column of soft light in its place, seafoam green and gently rippling.

"Hahaha, yes! In your _face_ , tube!" Babs crowed, jabbing a finger toward the light. She turned to face Jen, and he suspected she was grinning her face off behind that tongue. "Told you I'd get this thing up and running again."

"So… what _is_ it, anyway?" Jen finally slithered into the room, scraping his claws together all the while. "Have you ever seen anything like this?"

"No. Well… actually yeah, kind of. It reminds me a little of—"

The column of light brightened dramatically; Jen reflexively shut his eyes and shouted, as much in surprise as in pain. His eyelids couldn't even block it all out. Hissing, he tried to shield his face with his hands… but they were gone. Everything was gone: the light, the floor underneath him, _his own body_ —

—but only for a moment.

"Jen? _Jen_? Oh. Oh thank God, you're all right…"

 _Babs._ The last he'd seen of her was before everything had exploded into blazing light. After a moment's hesitation, he finally dared to open his eyes.

At first, he saw little more than pink static, with the vague outline of a greninja right in front of him. Once that abated, he had just enough time to see that Babs seemed unharmed before the rest of his current circumstances seized his attention.

They were no longer in the lab. Where they were, he couldn't even begin to guess. The room was roughly the size of the one they'd left and more or less ovoid, the curved surfaces a faintly metallic gray. There was a round lamp set into the ceiling, filling the space with whitish light that was thankfully much softer than the light that had brought them here.

As far as he could tell, there were no doors.

"Babs… where are we? And how are we gonna get out of here?"

"I don't know," she said, but was quick to add, "But I _will_ find out; I promise you. And I will figure out what the _hell_ is going on here. Ren wanted answers, not more questions."

"You said the light kind of reminded you of something," Jen remembered aloud. "What was it?"

Babs folded her arms. "A transport device. Meaning Ren might've spent the past fourteen-odd years somewhere other than dreamland, yet he doesn't even remember this place. Or the fact that the tube apparently led here."

 _Missing memories…_ Jen certainly had some experience in that department. "Maybe someone tampered w—"

He didn't finish the sentence, his train of thought derailed by what he'd just seen. The wall to his left had just shuddered, as if alive. He stared, dumbfounded, as its seamless surface began parting down the middle like a set of curtains and an unfamiliar creature entered through the opening.

The newcomer had no visible face to their name, apart from their eyes. But Jen and Babs alike got the distinct impression that the stranger was genuinely surprised to see them. 

\- o - 

The door opened, raising fresh swirls of dust from the floor. Demi and Acheron filed in, finished with their hunting. Deranic territory wasn't much further now; Ren wanted both kwazai's senses on the case.

The human had finished his own breakfast, as well, his mind clearly elsewhere all the while. He hadn't said a word to Syr or Karo all day, and he'd only made a wordless, acknowledging noise when the twins had announced they were stepping out.

Syr couldn't blame him. He'd had too much on his own mind for conversation, as well. They were getting close to their destination, to the last place he'd seen Faurur and her charges—the latter of whom might number in the dozens now, or more. He could only guess what "breeding out of control" entailed. At any rate, odds were very good they'd be engaging the deranics' forces even sooner than they'd bargained for. He cast another glance out the broken window to his side as if he expected the smog to come rolling in at any moment.

Ren stood, stretching his arms and legs, and excused himself for a short time. Upon returning, "Does anyone else have any reason to hang around here any longer?"

No. No, Syr acknowledged, they really didn't.

When no one answered in the affirmative, Ren nodded and made for the door. Three pokémon followed him out under the setting sun; Karo was currently in the ball to allow the party to move faster, while the nullshade was shut away for the same reasons as always.

The nullshade's ball was out of the pack now, secured to the human's belt. Ideally, it would stay there. Its contents were a last resort, a weapon for the most desperate circumstances only. A weapon they might not be able to control.

A reason, among all the others, why Syr was so deeply grateful that Jen hadn't come along, no matter how much he missed him.

Rustboro was just visible off to the right, but that wasn't their destination. They'd be heading into the woods again, albeit a different forest this time. It was the last thing standing between them and the place where he and his trainer had parted ways, and if it was anything like the previous forest, it wouldn't be empty.

"What if the psychics are in there?" he mused aloud. "Maybe the ghosts just ran them out of town."

"Too bad they didn't run our way," Acheron said.

"If they even existed," Ren pointed out. He unzipped his jacket—this evening was rather warmer than the past few, and the sky was still clear—but insisted on keeping his hood up for the time being. "But suppose they did exist. Now suppose they were teleporters. They could've gone anywhere." He stopped watching the ground in front of himself for a moment, looking straight ahead. "Including where we're going."

"We can certainly hope so," Demi said.

And then stopped dead in her tracks. The next second, Acheron did likewise. Syr bumped right into the latter, whose tail lashed reflexively.

"Sorry, sorry…" Syr moved out in front of the two kwazai. "What's going on?"

Neither of them answered at first. The two of them just stared ahead, at some unseen point past the trees. They trembled on the spot, their jaws parted. All eight of their oculons were locked in the same direction.

Finally, "Deaths," Acheron said, much softer than he usually spoke. "Sudden. Dozens of them."

"And a burst of poison-type energy," Demi added. Her tail still flicked in agitation. "That… that can't be natural. It's too pure. There's too much of it."

"It's _not_ natural." Ren stepped forward and lay a hand on one of each of the kwazai's arms. His own were shaking so much that it was a wonder he could direct them. "It's _them_. It's their weapon. It has to be."

"Oh… oh God…" Syr felt his mouth and throat go dry. It made all too much sense. _That_ was why the deranics had needed the koffing. _Seterhath Zulo-Denvenda_ was powered by their elemental energy.

Ren drew a shaking breath, his hooded head bowed for a moment. "Okay," he said quietly. "You can handle this. I promise you can." He was trying to sound composed, but his voice was too brittle. "Stay with it. We need to know if it's spreading."

Still staring into the distance, "…Spreading?" Acheron responded. "No. No, it's already over. The pulse, I mean. No more casualties… for now."

"That might've been a test run," Demi guessed aloud. "The next one could be bigger."

 _Bigger._ Morbid images immediately filled Syr's mind, echoes of the past that suddenly felt like the future. Bodies dropping everywhere, seizing up and gasping for air just like his own prey. Pyres burning into the night. Entire cities wracked with grief and fear. Rustboro could be next.

 _Convergence_ could be next.

That was the thought that broke him. With a strangled cry, Syr doubled back and surged toward the tunnel, sparing no attention for the rocks that bit into his flesh. All that mattered now was his son. All that mattered was being there for him, if he couldn't save him…

Voices shouted from behind. Long, loping steps swiftly approached, and soon there were arms around his chest, holding him back.

"Let me go!" he said between sobs. "Let me go, please; I have to get to him…"

"It's too far," Acheron said. "Too far to run. You'd kill yourself trying."

"We're gonna die anyway!" Though the kwazai was only holding him tightly enough to keep him in place, he could feel his breaths growing short. His heart was hammering too fast, too hard.

"Syr… you _can't_ see him anytime soon," Demi said as she circled around Syr and Acheron. "It'll be at least a few more days unless we find a teleporter."

"And your son's a poison-type," Acheron reminded Syr. "It's an elemental weapon. Depending on how it works… he might be immune. Or at least resistant."

It took a moment for the words to sink in properly. _Poison._ His own element. He knew how it worked. And yes… yes, no matter how hard it was to believe, his son was a fellow poison-type now. _He's_ not a snorunt _anymore._

Syr's heart slowed, if only somewhat. The lights stopped popping in the back of his eyes. He could breathe again… but he couldn't completely trust that Jen was out of the woods. Neither was he, for that matter. It was, after all, possible to kill someone of his element with poison. Very, very difficult, but possible all the same.

Still, he relaxed just enough for Acheron to apparently trust that he wouldn't bolt now, and indeed he stayed put once the kwazai let go. Stayed put, but kept eying that tunnel back to Verdanturf.

"We have to keep moving…" Ren said, somewhat out of breath; Syr, unaware that the human had caught up, jolted in surprise. "We've gotta keep moving on."

 _Moving on._ The words prickled along Syr's spine. Moving forward, when no small part of him wanted to rush back the way he'd come. Pressing on, when some might expect him to give up.

When others had been promised that he'd press on.

"We have to keep moving," he echoed hoarsely.

"Right," Ren said. "Right." With that, he pulled another max potion out of the pack and motioned for Syr to roll over.

The arbok didn't follow at first. Then he finally, truly acknowledged the taste of blood on the air and realized its origin. He complied, wincing as Ren healed the cuts and scrapes that marred his belly. "Thanks," he said once he'd righted himself once more.

Ren only responded with a quick nod. He then looked to each of the twins in turn and gestured southward.

"Good idea," Demi said. Then she hoisted Syr up off the ground in all four arms.

"Wh—" Syr didn't have time to question her actions beyond that. In the next moment, he no longer needed to. She was already running back toward the forest, much faster than Syr could've gone under his own power. Acheron was galloping alongside her, carrying Ren.

There was no telling how long it would be before the next pulse. There was no telling where it would hit—or if anywhere would be safe. He and the others had to _move_.


	9. Light and Smoke

**Chapter 9 – Light and Smoke**

The ovoid room opened into a winding tunnel. The walls were the same, shimmery gray here, with green and red cables snaking along the length of the hall like veins.

Gliding effortlessly ahead of them was the creature who'd opened the door: bipedal, with two pairs of of tentacles trailing back from their sides—most of the time. Every so often one pair would retract, and much of the creature's reddish armor would go with it.

Babs had harbored a hunch about the being's identity from the moment she'd laid eyes on them, and their fluttering between forms only bolstered her certainty. She only knew their kind from pictures and articles, but she knew enough to give her a nasty suspicion about what had happened to Ren.

Jen was right, assuming he'd been thinking what it had sounded like he'd been thinking. Babs had arrived at the same conclusion herself soon after she'd materialized in this place: someone or another had messed with Ren's head. And these beings, these deoxys, these __psychics__ , were looking like awfully likely candidates.

 _"_ _ _We want answers,"__ she'd demanded just before they'd left the room. _"_ _ _And we want__ out _ _."__

The deoxys at the door had said nothing at all in response. The psychic-type had jolted at her voice, their tentacles fretfully writhing. From the looks of it, the deoxys had been afraid of her.

 _ _Good,__ she'd thought, and had whipped her tongue in the creature's general direction. Paralytic toxins and a touch of faintly glowing ectoplasm had splattered against the floor just in front of the deoxys's dainty, pointed feet. The spot she'd licked had quivered, as if in revulsion.

Meanwhile, despite hovering a couple of inches off the floor, the deoxys had reeled back in alarm. Then they'd turned toward the tunnel beyond and made beckoning motions with their left tentacles. Seeing as there'd only been one confirmed exit from that initial room, Babs had followed; after a brief hesitation, so had Jen.

Eventually their guide stopped, brushing tentacles against the wall to their right. Again the wall rippled and split, and the deoxys led the two of them through it. Like the previous entryway, its edges felt curiously soft as Babs brushed past them. And, just as before, she turned back toward it once she'd passed through to find it seamless once more. She pressed a hand against it—it was as firm as stone now.

The three of them had entered another rounded, graphite-gray room, much larger than the one they'd left behind. A couple dozen of those simple, round lights she'd seen before were embedded high above. The walls and ceiling alike were covered with more green and red cables, many more, which formed an impenetrable thicket at the far end of the room.

The mass of cables shifted, writhing in place with an odd whispering noise. Something bulged forward from its center. The cables unfurled from around it as it slowly emerged, until finally they revealed another deoxys.

This one was legless and considerably larger than the first, perhaps ten feet tall from the tips of their five horns to the end of their short tail. Their core took up their entire chest, an enormous purple sphere easily four times the size of their head. They drifted out to the center of the room, hovering some seven feet off the floor with all those countless cables—those __tentacles__ , Babs realized—sprouting from their sides and tethering them to the wall behind them.

Babs heard Jen slowly approach her side. His claws clicked and rasped against each other all the while. "Babs… this doesn't seem safe," he said under his breath. "At all."

"Don't worry about it," she assured him. "I've got this." To the larger deoxys, "All right. I take it you're the boss around here?"

The voice that responded filled the room. Metallic droning and hissing sibilants and sounds she had no name for resonated from every direction at once.

Jen cried out at its volume. Babs winced, biting what little of her tongue she kept inside her mouth. "Yeah, no, didn't catch that," she said once the echoing died down. "Whatever that is, I don't speak it."

There was another, much quieter burst of the indecipherable language. The first deoxys moved forward and floated up to the other's eye level. The two psychic-types conversed among themselves for a moment, forcing both their guests to cover their ears.

Finally, the guide turned to face Babs and Jen once more, then left the room in something of a hurry. The wall sealed shut behind them, trapping the greninja and cryonide alone with the huge deoxys.

"Hey!" Babs put herself squarely in front of Jen. "You can't keep us locked up here forever!"

"Yes. I can."

The voice wasn't the deoxys's own. It was Jen's, albeit distorted and emotionless. Babs turned about in an instant and saw the cryonide surrounded by a pale blue aura. His eyes burned with the same color, and brilliantly at that; his pupils were washed right out of sight by the piercing glow.

"But I won't," Jen went on; the words weren't his own, Babs recognized. "We mean you no harm. And no. No, I am not in charge. I am only the curator of our collected knowledge."

"No harm…" Babs scoffed, turning to face the deoxys once more. Their body, including their countless tentacles, was surrounded by the same blue glow as the pokémon they'd taken over. "You're psychically manipulating a poison-type. You __know__ that's a bad idea. You __know__ you could kill him."

Puppeted by the deoxys, Jen slithered out from behind her. He came to rest on his coiled tail just below the hovering psychic-type, his arms hanging slack at his sides. "At this moment, he is an extension of my body. I can extend my regenerative power to his flesh as if it were my own. He will survive, uninjured."

Babs was about to express her doubt, but the words died in her throat when the cryonide lifted a hand and raked his long, deadly claws across his own stomach. The deoxys's unearthly voice rang out once more.

She swore sharply and launched into the air, straight toward the curator's face. Her night slash connected; she heard the creature cry out again, felt their carapace splinter under her conjured dark-type blades. Tiny fragments of it fell with her as she dropped back to the floor. She sprang backward from her landing, looking up to assess the damage…

…Which was disappearing right before her eyes.

Her gaze fell upon Jen. His wounds were vanishing, as well… including a gash across his face that mirrored the one she'd inflicted upon the deoxys. Aghast, she looked up once more; sure enough, a set of deep scratches was closing up on the deoxys's abdomen, just below their core.

"We mean you no harm," Jen repeated.

Babs swore again, hands clenching into fists. Jen wasn't just an interpreter in all this. He was a hostage.

She locked eyes with the deoxys again, tense as a coiled spring, and stared at them in furious silence for a moment. "I'll hold you to that," she finally warned them. "You and everyone else in this place. I know you can't recover forever." Especially not when so much of that power was going toward keeping Jen intact despite direct psychic manipulation. "You'd better let him go before you hurt him in ways you can't fix."

"I will," Jen said; then, "You should hesitate no longer in asking your questions."

"Fine. What the hell did you do to my trainer?"

"Nothing. We have no previous knowledge of you or anyone you know."

Babs shook her head. "Not buying it. He entered that device without even knowing what it was. A device that would've brought him __here__ if it hadn't gone on the fritz and spit him out beforehand."

"Your device was transmitting a distress beacon matching the psychic signature of our kind. That's the only reason we brought its contents aboard. We had expected other deoxys."

"Which Ren isn't! __Something__ made him go into that thing against his will. And __something__ made him build it in the first place. Yeah, he has no memory of that, either. It's the __one thing__ , the __one part__ of his lab he can't explain. So here we have a human being, unwittingly constructing some kind of transport pod that transmits deoxys signals, and I'm supposed to believe you had nothing whatsoever to do with it?"

"No one aboard this vessel had any knowledge of your world prior to receiving your beacon."

Babs maintained her suspicious stare into the curator's eyes. Even if the deoxys was telling the truth… The gap in Ren's memory, the period of time he'd apparently slept right through, had begun roughly fourteen years ago—just prior to the Extinction. If the tube had begun transmitting its signal as soon as he'd gone inside…

Her lips curled in a snarl behind her tongue. "Billions of people," she said, shaking in anger where she stood, "were killed by a plague of unknown origin. We still don't know where the hell it came from. But we know __when__ it came, deoxys: __right after__ Ren built that thing. He unwittingly built a beacon to summon you—and then an entire species bites the dust."

Dark-type energy bloomed about her arms, longing to coalesce into blades again. She indulged it, casting her own face in deep violet light, wishing dearly that she could put her elemental weapons to use without endangering Jen. "Tell me, deoxys: what the __hell__ do you expect me to believe?"

The curator said nothing at first. Then they emitted another burst of indecipherable noise, even louder than any that had preceded it. Jen trembled in their telekinetic grasp, the light surrounding him going unsteady. With a final flicker, it went out entirely, and the cryonide collapsed in a thorny heap.

Babs leapt to his side automatically. He didn't look hurt, not on the outside… but there was no telling if things were all right inside his skull. He still breathed, but God only knew for how long. With a scream, she flung herself at the deoxys again, her conjured night slash flaring bright and trained right on the deoxys's core—

—but never connecting. Something seized her from below, pulling hard; her gaze snapped downward and found thick, flattened tentacles pulling her back to the floor, away from her target. She slashed at them instead, again and again, but they wouldn't break, wouldn't let go. The wounds she inflicted healed just as quickly as she could deal them.

More tentacles surged up to bind her, successfully pinning her arms to her sides and her tongue to her shoulders. She let a lick attack ripple along its length, and the red and green flesh shuddered, but it still refused to release her.

Jen, still insensible, was wrapped up in a snarl of tentacles as well. Babs saw a quartet of bulky, dome-headed deoxys emerge from the floor as if it were liquid; slithering sounds behind her told that something similar was happening on her end. She screamed in rage, muffled and wordless in the deoxys' grasp until their grip tightened further—suddenly she couldn't breathe.

She had a fleeting sense of being dragged away before everything went dark.

\- o -

The forest was blowing apart.

With a shout that was smothered in mud a split second later, Syr dove ungracefully into the soft earth just as a nearby tree went to splinters. A couple managed to stick in his flesh despite his efforts; they snagged painfully as he pulled the rest of himself underground.

He swallowed the screaming and spitting he'd have let loose on the surface, intent on holding his breath. It was hard enough with his hood compressed against his sides. Sooner than he'd wanted to, he was forced to erupt from the forest floor in a burst of mud charged with ground-type energy. He rolled clumsily out of the way when it came raining back down, falling short of the bellies of the koffing overhead as if repelled by an invisible field.

Hissing, Syr rolled into a nearby trench and huddled under the dead log spanning it. He folded in on himself and pulled one of the splinters from his belly—and cursed in immediate regret. All that had done was let the wound bleed more freely.

"Demi!" he cried out hoarsely, hoping as he dissolved into a coughing fit that she could pinpoint his location by sound alone. The smokescreen above was growing thicker by the moment, blotting out any moonlight that might have reached them otherwise. The kwazai didn't need their eyes to detect their allies and enemies, but their higher senses would struggle to focus if it got too hard for them to breathe. He tried to shout her name again, but another explosion somewhere out of reach drowned it out completely.

Something heavy landed on two feet right in front of him. The rest of the creature hit the ground a moment later, smelling distinctly of kwazai. __Demi!__

A koffing burst through the smoke in front of the two, already blazing with the telltale glow of an imminent explosion—only to lose hold of it when Demi lunged and dragged him down to the rain-soaked leaf litter. The koffing bellowed and writhed underneath her, swelling menacingly. Pulsing pink-and-gold light surrounded the two of them… and the koffing stopped struggling, deflating as fresh tears opened up in his mantle. Demi's wounds, meanwhile, were rapidly closing.

The branches of her tail rippled, their oculons briefly meeting Syr's gaze in the fading light. Demi immediately turned to face him and called upon another pain split, partially healing his wounds at the cost of inflicting weaker versions of them upon herself.

"Thanks," Syr said automatically as he felt new strength welling up inside him, but he was hardly relieved. Demi only had so much of her own vitality to give. Eventually there wouldn't be enough conscious bodies around to replenish it. Another blast rang out, hurtling more wooden shrapnel through the smokescreen above. Another drainable target lost.

Without a word, Demi sprang out of the trench. Syr turned blindly in the direction she'd gone, steeling himself to jump back into the fray, filling his lungs with relatively clean air while he could. His fangs glowed a deep violet, ready to puncture the hide of one of their attackers—and then the light abruptly cut out, its maker startled into losing the charge as an enormous set of jaws closed over his head.

He screamed into the cavernous, reeking mouth as its owner began slowly lifting him off the ground. His own mouth lit up with dark-type energy once more as he plunged his fangs into the oily tongue attempting to smother his face. The attack drew a muffled, pained roar from two voices at once—a __weezing__.

His blood ran cold. With an effort that wasn't entirely physical, he flung the rest of his body over the floating creature, wrapping tight around the junctures between their body sections. He squeezed desperately, but to little effect. His oxygen supply was rapidly dwindling, taking his strength along with it…

Then there was a deafening noise and an explosion of light behind his eyes, and the next thing Syr knew, he was free.

If he hadn't seen the weezing dropping out of the air alongside him, he wouldn't even have known he was falling. He couldn't feel the air as it rushed past, couldn't feel the impact when he hit the ground. He realized with a delay that he was breathing properly again, hearing and then tasting the breaths passing over his tongue. Another beat later, he figured out that he couldn't move.

A strangled cry escaped him, but his mouth refused to form words. Slowly, horribly slowly, his gaze panned across the inverted and dimly-lit scene before him… and landed upon a nosepass several yards away. Ren was crouching next to him, and there was a faint glow about Karo's nose that was only just fading out. __Zap cannon.__ Karo had been the one to take down that weezing. Syr had just had the misfortune of being in the line of fire.

"Syr! Hang in there, buddy!" the nosepass called out to him. Syr heard Ren grab something out of his pack as the two hurried to pull the arbok into the safety of Karo's block field.

Relief spread through Syr as they closed the gap. He didn't feel the force field envelop him this time, but he was sure it had; Ren was now moving freely at his side, in space he wouldn't have dared to occupy if it weren't safe.

"Man," said Karo, sounding more than a little tired, "am I ever grateful to see you again."

"Lll… likewise," Syr managed, still slightly mushmouthed; the medicine Ren was administering was only just taking effect. The party had gotten separated very early in the attack; Syr had gone to ground as a reflex, and by the time he'd first emerged the smokescreen had gone up, thick and nearly impenetrable.

"Try not to dig again, all right?" Karo advised him. "I can only extend the block so far."

Syr nodded in response as soon as he could lift his head again. He gazed out beyond the invisible barrier, taking in a moonlit view of shattered trunks and fallen bodies. Some of the latter belonged to koffing—none of which had gone to cinders, as far as he could tell. __That… that's good, at least.__ It meant those koffing were still alive. There was still a chance they could be free, if all went well enough.

The same… could not be said of most of the non-koffing lying in the moonlight.

He'd known to expect the dead. He'd anticipated coming across them under much calmer circumstances, but he'd known they were headed for a grim scene all the same. That made it no easier to look upon the victims now. Most of them appeared uninjured, but their bodies were contorted in a way that told him they'd probably spent their last moments writhing in pain. Syr helplessly wondered if that's how his human friends had looked at the end; at that thought, he immediately wrenched his gaze from the fallen.

His attention shifted back toward Karo. "Are you all right?" he managed, at which Karo grunted inconclusively. That… wasn't comforting. Syr couldn't see any damage to the nosepass's person, but…

 _ _The kwazai.__ Something turned to ice inside him. "Where are the twins?" he asked, panic rising in his voice. "Where are they?"

"Don't know, buddy," Karo said. "But they've gotta be all right.. They're not pushovers. They've never been…"

Ren, meanwhile, was silently, shakily rising to his feet. He took a step forward, toward the boundary of the block field; noticing this, Karo and Syr moved with him.

The arbok followed the human's line of sight and picked out the deflated form of the weezing, still lying helplessly in the leaves and scattered debris. The poison-type groaned very quietly as the three of them approached. Another pair of voices, just as weak, echoed in Syr's memory, and he swallowed hard against a lump in his throat.

Wordlessly, Ren knelt before the weezing. There was a poké ball in his hand—the one from Mauville, Syr realized. Not taking his eyes off his target for even a second, Ren swept his free hand downward, at which Karo made an acknowledging noise but nothing else appeared to happen. The human adjusted his grip on the ball, cocked his arm back—

And dissolved into a shapeless blob of red light.

Syr recoiled in alarm, falling backward; the shield was down. Karo gave a shout as the ball clattered awkwardly to the ground, still partially open and trailing light. The light quivered and then withdrew sharply into the capture device, which promptly snapped shut. The nosepass and arbok could only stare at it, both at a loss for words. Then the energy surged back out and snapped into the shape of a human body with a horrible, distorted noise.

Ren stood there among the leaves and the dead, panting and sweating and trembling so hard that it looked as though he could fall apart at any second. His hood fell back over his shoulders as he shook.

Somewhat gingerly, Karo reached up to prod at the human's side. "Hey… hey Ren?" he spoke up. "Are you—"

Ren's mouth worked silently for a moment. Then he crumpled to the ground.


	10. Belief

**Chapter 10 – Belief**

The kwazai came thundering in, heedless of any bodies in their path until they arrived at their trainer's side. Both dropped to the filthy ground next to him as swiftly as their oddly-jointed legs allowed. Both their tails were lashing, and Demi was uttering a stream of prayers and profanity under her breath. Being the faster of the two, she was the one to gather Ren up in her free arms, though both kwazai grabbed for him.

Syr coiled frozen before the siblings, all but biting his tongue in worried anticipation. He couldn't tell whether or not Ren was even alive. He hadn't had the wits to see if the man was breathing before the kwazai had shown up, and now Demi's arms blocked the view. He'd have to get the verdict from her or her brother secondhand.

His jaws parted to ask. But before he could get a breath out, "He's still with us," Karo spoke up. "…Right?"

"Right." Acheron certainly felt some relief at that fact, but there was none of that in his voice. His tail had snaked around his waist to inspect the human and continued to do so; Demi's was doing likewise, two branches over each shoulder.

"What happened?" Demi demanded, half-hissing. Her sharp teeth were bared. "What the hell __happened__ to him?"

Once again, Syr made to speak. Once again, Karo beat him to the punch. "He __caught himself__ ," he said, and he sounded… excited, almost. " _ _That's__ what happened."

Acheron made a noise that might've become a word if something hadn't plainly caught his attention then. "There," he said in the next moment, meeting Syr's gaze and pointing a short distance to the arbok's right.

Syr glanced in that direction and thought he saw something reflecting a fleck of moonlight. Closer inspection revealed the ball, or what was left of it. It had been blown open, from the looks of it, its hinge bent backward so that the two halves touched. He scooped it up in his jaws but promptly spat it back out; it tasted burnt, and there were other, worse flavors to it that he feared to contemplate.

"It's fried," he said. "I guess this means he definitely won't be catching that weezing." Another rightward look told him the pokémon in question was still down. Alive, but possibly unconscious and therefore immune to a fresh ball anyhow. But they could've waited. Now they had no such option.

"Nnnn…" came a small voice from in front of him. Ren's voice. The human wriggled feebly in Demi's hold, lifting his hairless head. "Where…" Apparently that was as much of a sentence as he could manage at the moment.

"Still in the forest," Acheron answered. "The fight's over."

Ren made a faint, disagreeable noise and shook his head. "Somewhere else… Now…"

"Yes," Syr agreed at once, almost automatically. The koffing could start waking up at any time, and here was Ren, at his most vulnerable thus far. But there were additional reasons to get out of there, and Syr suspected the human had at least some of them on his mind.

Maybe Ren had been able to brave the sight of this place before. But in the wake of his impossible capture, there was no telling what he could handle.

Demi took Karo's capture ball and recalled the nosepass, then passed her trainer to her brother and gathered Syr into her many arms once more. The two kwazai took off, leaving the clearing and the carnage behind and weaving their way into a part of the forest that hadn't been withered or blasted away.

But as darkness fell over them once more, the fear of unseen dangers rose anew. It didn't help that Syr could still smell the smoke and the koffing still lingering back in the clearing. The odors clung to him, furthermore, and to the rest of the party. It made it all the harder to be sure they'd really shaken them off for the time being.

"Water," he thought aloud. "We need to find water." Even if it couldn't mask the smell entirely, it'd weaken it. His nerves would be grateful. His throat would be, too, after all the smoke and exertion.

"We will…" Demi muttered. Her mind was plainly on other things.

Syr realized then that he hadn't heard a single sound out of Ren since the clearing. He almost asked about him, but no. That wasn't necessary. If his condition worsened, the two empaths in their midst would give it away.

The sound of running water eventually caught his attention. "There's a creek up ahead," Acheron announced soon after. The taste of fresh water on the air arrived soon after, followed by the sight of moonlight sparkling off the water's surface.

Demi stopped, setting Syr down alongside the creek. The arbok dipped his snout in for a drink, then let himself slip entirely underwater for a moment. When he raised his head above the surface to breathe, he saw a burst of light in the shape of a nosepass. Syr rippled his way through the shallow water, crawling over the stones until he reached the bank once more.

"Shield, right?" Karo asked. Nobody answered aloud, but someone must've nodded; there was that brief, full-body pressure again. "You awake, buddy?" he then asked.

"…Yeah." Ren's voice suggested an unspoken "barely". He inhaled audibly; then, "The ball… it pulled me in. How…?"

"We don't know," Syr told him, wishing he had an answer. It only occurred to him after the fact that he could really only speak for himself on the matter.

"Oh, I think I know," Karo said. There was that odd, giddy sort of tone again. Heavy footsteps reverberated through the rocks as the nosepass moved in closer to his trainer. "Congrats," Karo said. "You're officially one of us."

"Not in that sense," Acheron said. "You're still human, Ren."

"And yet the ball got him," Karo pressed on. "I mean, yeah, it couldn't hold onto him, but." Stone scraped against stone, the familiar sound of arms swiveled into a shrug. "So what? Sometimes we break 'em. Doesn't mean a thing."

"It could have been modified to catch humans," Acheron said.

That hadn't even crossed Syr's mind as a possibility. Now that he thought about it, "There'd be people who'd try it. People with an anti-human agenda."

"Or people with a __pro__ -human agenda," Demi offered, "wanting to capture them and lock them away for their own safety. Or people just curious as to whether or not it could be done."

"Guys. __Guys__. Please. Do you not hear yourselves right now?" Karo was actually starting to sound a little agitated at this point. "Why are you jumping through hoops like this when there's a much simpler answer right in front of you?"

"Because," Demi said quietly, "if he were anything other than human, we'd know. We'd __feel__ it. I know you know this."

Karo didn't respond at first. Then he averted his gaze with a small sort of huffing sound. "…How can you be cool with that?" he asked. "How am __I__ supposed to be cool with this, when for all we know that virus or poison or whatever could still be floating around? I mean…" There was a moment's silence, and then another's. "We just got him back."

 _ _Oh.__ Syr felt a sudden weight in the vicinity of his heart. Karo really __couldn't__ accept that a human could've survived the plague. Convincing himself that Ren was a pokémon was apparently the only way to stave off fears that it would come for his trainer after all.

Wordlessly, Syr emerged from the water and gently wrapped himself around Karo in an embrace of sorts. It occurred to him in nearly the same moment that he was sopping wet; he let go immediately, though he wished he hadn't had to.

Meanwhile Ren squirmed in Acheron's arms. "Let me go," he said, but not harshly. He sounded as though he'd got a bit more of his strength back.

Acheron hesitated for a moment, then set him down on his feet. Ren immediately hugged the nosepass, and both kwazai embraced the two of them in turn.

Syr gave a faint, grateful smile. __Now he won't get wet,__ he reckoned, and encircled the rest of his friends.

"Can't lose him again," Karo murmured to himself in the middle of it all.

Part of Syr wanted to assure Karo that no, he wouldn't lose Ren anytime soon. The rest… couldn't bear to lie to him. He __wasn't__ sure Ren would be all right. Even if there was no trace of the plague anywhere now, even if Ren was entirely immune to it anyway, there were still innumerable things that could go wrong during this mission. They were facing a relatively unknown and uncounted enemy. There was no way of knowing exactly what sort of danger they were in.

This was, after all, quite possibly a one-way trip. But Syr had the sinking feeling that somewhere along the way, Karo had taken to refusing—and continued refusing—to truly acknowledge that.

"We know you're worried," Demi said. Acheron nodded in assent.

"We __all__ know," Ren put in. "I'm worried, too. Of course I wonder if… if maybe I'm living on borrowed time. I hope I'm not. I don't wanna leave you, either. But…" Here he raised his head, looking over one shoulder and then the other, meeting the gaze of each of his pokémon in turn. "…whatever happens, I think you'll be all right. You're all strong. All of you." He nodded toward Syr. "That includes you."

Syr took on a funny sort of surprised expression for a moment before a hint of guilt settled into it. It was nice of Ren to say such a thing, but believing it… wasn't so easy. "I don't know about that," he admitted.

The human kept one arm around Karo but turned to face Syr, or tried to; recognizing this, the pokémon surrounding him loosened their grip and backed up a bit. "You've already been through a lot," Ren told Syr. "And a lot of it was recent, __very__ recent. Anyone—anyone with half a heart—would've understood if you'd needed some time before taking this on. I would've. Your old friend probably would've. And yet…" He spread his free arm as far as he could. "Here you are."

Syr's gaze drifted groundward as he absorbed that. He still wasn't altogether sure he agreed with the human's words. In the end, all he could think to do with the information was to try and prove Ren right. Maybe, he supposed, he'd convince himself in the process.

At this point, Ren got around to healing the twins. Syr watched him hand out bottles of medicine to each of them, wondering for a moment how many they had left. He tried to take stock of the kwazai's conditions in the moments before their injuries vanished, but it was difficult in a number of ways, what with so much blood and filth smeared over their bodies.

"Okay," Ren said. "Time to get moving again. We'll detour west a bit, just enough to put more space between us and the koffing." He reached for one of his capture balls then, only to find an empty space.

"Oh whoops, here," Demi said as she handed him Karo's ball.

"Ready?" Ren asked Karo, pointing the lens at him.

"…Yeah," Karo said. "But hey. Be careful, all right? We still haven't had that party."

"I will be," Ren assured him with something of a smile, then recalled him and nodded up at the kwazai. They scooped up the slower members of their party and set off, splashing through the creek and disappearing into the dark woods beyond.


	11. Away

**Chapter 11 – Away**

In the park on the corner on Bayberry Street, a shroomish shuffled through the grass. It had been a long night, and he wanted nothing more at that moment than a nice, long sit in his preferred thinking spot. There ahead of him was a large tree whose branches cast a lovely, deep shadow. The grass and soil beneath still looked good and soft and damp with dew. This, he thought, was going to be _nice_.

Then his destination burst into golden light, and all of a sudden there was a very large glalie and an even larger steelix and… something he could barely see, let alone identify, all right in front of him.

He decided right about then that he needed to go find a new thinking spot.

The newly arrived pokémon, meanwhile, never saw the shroomish hurrying away behind them. Their sights were trained on the three-story house across the street.

"And here we are," said the smallest of the three. She was a mercirance: a red-furred, black-maned biped whose face resembled nothing so much as a bare skull. "Let me know when you're ready to come back; I think I'll have a look around town in the meanwhile."

"Of course," said the glalie. He turned his luminous gaze upon her. "Thank you for the lift, Quiul. We appreciate it."

"It's no trouble at all," Quiul said with a wave of her hand. "Hopefully this visit goes more smoothly for you than the last."

"Wouldn't have to try too hard to pull that off," the steelix said.

"It really wouldn't, would it." Quiul drew a breath and let it out on a rueful little sigh. "But at least you found what you were looking for, in the end."

"Yes," the glalie said. His gaze drifted away from her and back toward that house. His brother was there… there, and genuinely interested in learning more about the family he'd once forgotten, judging by the conversations they'd had the last time they'd spoken. Genuinely considering them family now, rather than the enemies he'd been bewitched into believing they were.

Jen might never wish to leave Convergence. But as far as Solonn and his steelix father were concerned, they'd gotten him back in a way that was much, much more meaningful.

"I'd best let you two go, then. Take care, Grosh," Quiul said. "Take care, Solonn."

"You, too," the former responded as the mercirance began padding away along the sidewalk. He looked down at the glalie. "Come on," he said. "No sense in keeping him waiting any longer."

Solonn gave a quick sort of nod of agreement. The two of them crossed the street, dodging a cordoned-off hole in the road that had been hastily filled with conjured rocks. Grosh hung back on the walkway while his son approached the front door and gently knocked with one of his horns.

He hovered there in silence, wondering who would answer the door. Hopefully not Syr; the arbok was still visibly uneasy around him and probably didn't need to open the door and find his face right on the other side. Solonn mindfully backed up a bit at that thought.

But as the moments passed, no one answered at all. Solonn tried again, a little louder this time, and waited a little longer afterward. There was still no response.

Had they all gone somewhere? He knew he couldn't rule it out, even though Jen at least had known to expect a visit right around now. Even so… it seemed kind of odd, as he thought about it, for _everyone_ to have gone. Wouldn't Ren have wanted to leave someone to guard the house, seeing as it had been invaded twice recently?

"Hello?" he called out. "Hello? Is anyone there?"

Nothing.

Grosh slithered up beside him. "They knew we were coming," he said.

"I know…" Solonn said. An all too familiar concern stirred inside him as he hovered there. He tried to tamp it down… but it was hard to quiet that fear so easily when it concerned someone who'd already been abducted once, and recently at that.

He sighed. "We'll just have to wait for them," he supposed aloud. He turned toward the park once more, figuring it would seem less suspicious to onlookers than loitering around in the yard might. Grosh followed, a couple of his segments twisting audibly, fretfully.

The two of them stopped under the tree closest to the sidewalk. There they sat, waiting for an arbok or a cryonide to come slithering up to the house across the street, for a kwazai to come striding onto the scene, for any sign of any of its inhabitants.

The sun climbed high into the sky, eventually dipping back toward the horizon. Apart from the yanma mail carrier, no one approached those doors during that time other than Solonn and Grosh themselves, futilely trying time and time again to rouse a response from someone inside. Those doors remained closed, the curtains remained still, and as it slowly grew dark, none of the windows lit up.

The knot of worry inside Solonn grew and tightened. Maybe the people who lived in that house really were just out for the day. Maybe they were far below in those labs—a thought that was discomfiting for his own, personal reasons, but preferable to the thought of everyone simply being gone. But he fretted all the same, watching the dark, silent house through eyes that flickered with unease, praying that history wasn't repeating.

 _Jen… where_ are _you?_

\- o -

The room was dark, its cluster of ceiling lamps dimmed to a bare minimum glow. A low, distant thrumming was the only noise to be heard… until a loud, creaking yawn sounded from against one of the curved walls.

Jen stretched where he lay, his arms extending out in front of him while his tail unfurled and flexed down its length. His eyes opened, and for a very brief moment nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It had just been a nice nap, that was all.

A nap following an encounter with an enormous psychic stranger.

He jolted upright with a yell and coiled up tight, throwing wild looks about. Where was the creature? Where was _he_? What had _happened_?

Jen couldn't even begin to answer the third question, but the others were somewhat more obliging. The huge pokémon wasn't there, at least not at the moment. He remembered the last entrance they'd made, coming in right through the wall as if it were liquid, and he shivered. What if they were lurking just beyond his metallic gray surroundings even now?

As for where he was, all he could be sure of was that he was still in the place the tube had taken him, just not the room he'd been in last. This one was smaller, and unless he was mistaken, the floor was rather softer; he could feel it yielding slightly to his weight, shifting about as he moved.

And there, curled up on the opposite side of the room, was Babs. She was still alive; her body heat still formed a luminous aura around her, and she breathed slowly, calmly. As far as he could tell, she was merely sleeping, same as he had been up until a minute or so ago.

The greninja stirred as he approached her, mumbling something incoherent as her brain started itself up. She then startled awake, much as he had, relaxing somewhat once she was satisfied that they were alone for the time being.

"Urgh. Stupid damn deoxys…" she muttered as she sat back down, rubbing at her neck.

"What did they do to us?" Jen asked, moving to coil beside her. "I remember the… the deoxys making all that awful noise, and then…" He half-shrugged. "Then I woke up here. What happened?"

"What happened is that the big one took you over," Babs answered, at which Jen's eyes brightened and flickered in alarm. "Apparently that's the only way they can talk to us—I'd have preferred it if they'd used me, but, well. Dark-type," she said with a sigh, tapping her head.

"And the psychic power knocked me out," Jen supposed aloud.

"Not right away. The deoxys was using their recovery powers to fix any damage they caused." She shuddered. "It worked. At least while they were controlling you. Are you feeling okay now?"

"Yeah," Jen said. He hoped that would continue to be the case. For all he knew, there was a blood vessel in his brain that was liable to burst at any moment.

That thought made him queasy. He swallowed thickly. "How'd we get here?" he asked, hoping to change the subject, if only slightly.

"Don't know," Babs answered. Her hand rose to massage the side of her neck again. "The big guy let you go, and I guess they put you under on the way out. They knocked me out the hard way." Her eyes narrowed under a furrowed brow. "Everything was going… fine-ish until I brought up the plague. Then they freaked out and attacked us." She looked Jen right in the eyes. "If _that's_ not suspicious, I don't know what is."

It _was_ awfully suspicious, Jen thought. Why would these deoxys react so strongly, so _violently_ to someone inquiring about the plague if they'd had nothing to do with it?

He curled in even tighter on himself, not liking what this might mean for himself and for Babs at all. No, he hadn't wanted his father to be en route to the lair of humanity's killers… but he hadn't exactly wanted to face them himself, either.

That was assuming that he and Babs hadn't been brought to exactly the place his father and company were headed. What if they were? What if "deoxys" was just another name for—

A bright red-and-green head with a blunt crest on either side suddenly popped out of the floor, interrupting Jen's thoughts and making him cry out in surprise. The deoxys cocked their head at him as the rest of their body showed itself, emitting a quiet little burst of indecipherable noise.

"You!" Babs shouted as she sprung to her feet.

The deoxys shrunk in on themself in response. They changed shape in an instant, taking on that mostly-gray, long-crested form Jen had seen one take before.

"Yeah, you. I don't su—hey, no, do NOT go back in the floor!" Babs said sharply, for the deoxys had begun doing that exactly. "Up. Now."

The deoxys complied, then shifted back into their previous form.

Once she was satisfied that they'd stopped moving, "I'm not going to hurt you," she said. "Not unless you attack first. Got it?"

Again the deoxys spoke up, just as quietly as they had before. Jen wondered if one of the deoxys from the auditorium, or whatever it had been, had spread the word that their voices caused their guests discomfort. Or maybe this was one of the deoxys from the auditorium.

Jen sincerely hoped this wasn't just that big one in another form.

"Okay," Babs said. "I take it you can't talk to us either, can you. Not without speaking _through_ one of us." She sighed, folding her arms. "Honestly, I'm not really sure why I'm even asking you. How the hell are you gonna answer me without going into puppeteer mode?"

Very tentatively, the deoxys glided closer to Jen. They unfurled a single tentacle in his direction, at which he recoiled automatically. But the deoxys refrained from actually touching him. They knew better, he reckoned, what with Babs staring them down. They stared back at her, face unreadable as ever, and tilted their head again.

She shook hers. "I'm not the one you should be asking. It's his brain. His safety. His choice. You ask him… such as you can."

The deoxys did nothing for a moment, seemingly unwilling to take their eyes off her. They managed it in the end, looking into Jen's eyes instead and pointing a tentacle at his spiked chest.

Jen hesitated to respond. The thought of being psychically manipulated brought back that queasy feeling again, for more reasons than one. He knew it could hurt him. He knew that he'd be completely powerless while under the deoxys's control. And he knew he wouldn't remember a moment of it—and he'd already had his memory messed with much more than he would've ever wanted.

But ultimately… ultimately, he thought with dismay, what choice did he have? How else were they going to get any answers from these creatures? They needed to know more, if they could. They needed to find out anything they could about this place—it might help them escape. And they needed to know what, if anything, the deoxys had to do with the plague.

He pulled in a deep breath. He almost consented right then and there, but caught himself; the deoxys might have taken him over the instant he'd agreed to it, and there were a few things he wanted to say first.

"When you're in there," he said to the deoxys, "…don't change anything, all right? Don't take out any memories. Don't put any in. And don't make me hurt anyone."

"Oh, I won't _let_ them do that," Babs promised. She flicked the end of her tongue at nothing in particular, letting a few glowing droplets fly.

"And you," Jen said, turning to face her. "You'll let me know everything they say, right?"

"Absolutely."

"Okay…" Jen said, steeling himself as best he could—and then his consciousness winked out in a flash.

Babs watched as, once again, the blue light surrounded Jen. The cryonide lifted his head, revealing the same burning blue eyes he'd sported last time. He uncoiled and slithered a little further away from Babs; the deoxys went with him. Under their psychic command, Jen gnashed his teeth a couple of times, clicking his fanged mandibles against them… and then giggled.

 _What the…_ Babs watched in bafflement for a moment as he kept on chattering and snapping, with the occasional, fleeting charge of dark-type energy flashing off his silver teeth. Then she realized what she was seeing.

"Okay, playtime's over," she told the deoxys. "He didn't let you do this so you could experience the joy and wonder of having a mouth. He did this because I want to talk to you. You get it?"

Jen stopped biting the air and bowed his head. "I'm sorry," he said. His voice was somewhat more inflected than it had been when the curator had puppeted him; he actually almost sounded sorry. "What did you want to talk about?"

"Well, first off: what was with the chokehold?" Babs demanded. "Why did you knock us out?"

"Because you needed to be decontaminated," Jen answered. "It's easier and faster to decontaminate people when they're sleeping."

"Decontaminate us…"

"Yes. You were carrying the Red Hand's virus. We had to scrub it off of you and take samples."

Maybe the virus she and Jen had been carrying and the plague that had wiped out humanity were two different things. Babs had a nasty feeling that wasn't the case, however… "This virus… how serious is it? Serious enough to kill off an entire species?"

Jen lowered his head again. "I'm afraid so. The Red Hand has eliminated many species this way."

Babs felt a chill spread throughout her and form a deep, cold pit in her stomach. If they really had been carrying the virus all this time… had Ren been exposed? Would he succumb?

Had he already?

"…Okay." It was hard to speak, with her mouth and throat having gone so dry. "In that case, what you need to do now is send us back where we came from." Maybe it was too late to get to Ren. But if it wasn't—if there was any chance he could be brought here and cleansed of the virus himself—then she needed to get to him.

If there wasn't any chance he could be brought here and decontaminated… then she at least wanted a chance to see him one last time.

"I… I know you want to go home," Jen said. "I'd want to go home, too, if someone took me away from here. But we can't send you back yet. Our transporter needs to rest."

"Rest? For how long?"

"Another two cycles, at least," Jen replied.

Whatever _that_ meant. Hours? Days? Babs almost demanded a clearer answer, but then suddenly remembered a couple things in particular that the curator had said: _This_ vessel _. Knowledge of_ our world _._

"And we can't just get out of here on our own," Babs said, "can we."

"No," Jen said. "I know you probably don't want to believe me, but… Here. Look."

The deoxys moved out from behind Jen, though the blue glow signifying their control remained. They glided over to the nearest wall and let a pair of their tentacles sink in. The wall visibly rippled… then seemed to vanish, revealing a corridor beyond. Three other deoxys passed by with fleeting glances at the newly-formed window. A moment later, the opposite wall turned transparent, as well, followed by several more beyond it—and then Babs found herself looking at nothing at all. Just an endless, black void.

There was, she considered, a chance this could all be a trick of some sort. That the view to space was merely an illusion of some kind, meant to make her believe she was trapped when she actually wasn't. But she recognized just as quickly that there was no real way to confirm it either way. If she shredded her way through those walls only to find that there really was nothing but a dark vacuum beyond, she'd be unable to help anyone at all anymore.

She cursed under her breath as the walls went opaque once more. No, she couldn't get to Ren from here on her own. Not with a very real chance that there was an unknown but assuredly _vast_ expanse of airless nothingness in the way.

"It won't be long at all," Jen tried to assure her. Babs looked his way once more. "We have the coordinates of your world from the beacon you sent," he said. "We're heading there now. By the time we get there, the transporter should be ready to send you back down."

"You had better be right," Babs muttered darkly. "Otherwise a mouth isn't the only thing you'll be missing."

Jen quailed a little. For a moment, it looked as though he were crying… but no. No, that was _blood_ , Babs realized, remembering the damage the curator had dealt to the cryonide. Jen's kind had colorless blood.

"You're hurting him," she told the deoxys. "You need to be using your recover technique while you're controlling him."

"I… I know," Jen said. Both he and the deoxys looked away, as if embarrassed. "I think I need to go now," he said, closing his eyes. "I'm not sure I can keep healing him much longer. I've never done this before," he admitted.

"…That's fine," Babs said, though she didn't entirely mean it. She still had questions, and she wished she could have them answered without anyone's health and safety on the line. _It is what it is,_ she thought, but not happily.

The blue glow vanished. The deoxys slipped back through the floor, leaving Jen to sway on the spot.

"Nnnnn…" he groaned, raising a hand to his head as he worked to regain his balance. His eyes opened, shining yellow once more. "Is it over with?"

"Yeah. How're you feeling?" Babs asked.

"Kind of dizzy," Jen answered. "But otherwise I'm fine. What did they say?" he asked.

"Several things," Babs said. She flopped back down into a sitting position with a sigh. "Some bad news… some potentially good news… and some unquestionably _weird_ news."


	12. In Bloom

**Chapter 12 – In Bloom**

The detour west had brought Syr and the rest of his party closer to Rustboro than they'd originally planned to go. In the morning, when they'd been seeking a place to camp, its south end would've been visible on the horizon—would have, if it hadn't been for the fact that it had been more or less destroyed more than a decade prior.

The sight hadn't surprised Syr. He'd known for years what had happened there. Though the plague had apparently put most of its victims to sleep before snuffing them out entirely, humanity's end had not been entirely peaceful. They'd passed out in their cars. In their planes. He'd heard some of the crashes from the woods south of Mauville, had felt the distant impacts rattle the earth.

An especially large craft had gone down in Rustboro. In the end, the city's survivors had not only elected against rebuilding at the crash site in any sense but had also chosen to raze what was left, leaving the barren site as a memorial to those lost there, humans and pokémon alike.

There had been pokémon casualties elsewhere, of course. Their death toll had certainly been lower than that of the humans, but still high enough to make some pokémon fear that the world was ending for all of its peoples. The only thing that separated the pokémon survivors from their dead (or from most of them, at least), was having been in the right places when the Extinction had hit.

If Syr had been in the wrong place…

Those thoughts were no kinder to him than they'd ever been. He shivered as he tried to get his mind on a different subject. It helped, but only slightly, that there was now a stone wall between him and the view to the west. It wasn't a cave, exactly; more of an outcropping, really. A wall and a half with a ceiling. It was the best shelter they could find in the area.

Syr turned toward Ren, or toward his scent and silhouette, at least. The human was fidgeting with something, passing it back and forth between his hands. One of the other pokémon's capture balls, Syr guessed, judging by the sound it made against Ren's palms.

Karo sat nearby, as well, facing northward and slowly rocking back on forth on his short legs, ready to block at any moment. Enemy territory was still too close for comfort, and for the time being, the three of them were alone, waiting for the twins to return from the hunt.

Or from scavenging. God knew it was a lot harder to find anything living in those woods now.

The human stopped rolling the ball around and sighed to himself, shaking his head at some unvoiced thought. Reminiscing about his brief, horrific time inside a similar device, perhaps. Ren hadn't really had a chance to go into detail about exactly what he'd experienced in there (though Syr wasn't so sure the human would've been ready to talk about it anyway), but judging from the way the failed capture had looked, Syr had a nasty feeling that it had been painful. Terrifying.

He gave Ren a pitying frown, wondering what, if anything, he ought to say. "How are you feeling?" he finally asked.

Ren just sort of grunted at first. "Dizzy," he said soon after.

Syr gave a sympathetic hum in response. "Because of the ball?" he supposed out loud.

"Or because he skipped breakfast," Karo said.

"No, I didn't," Ren responded.

Syr tried to recall if he'd seen Ren actually eat anything in the past couple of hours, but couldn't. He bumped the human's pack with his snout. "Maybe you could use something anyway."

Another grunt, but apparently Ren agreed; he swung the pack around and reached in. He kept digging through it for a few moments before letting out another sigh and simply shaking its contents out into the grass for easier access.

Syr found himself looking over the supplies as Ren felt around through them. The pile probably wasn't really much smaller than it'd been before they'd left Convergence in the first place. But looking at it now, with their destination so close at hand, he felt doubt creep into his perception of it.

"Do we still have enough medicine?" he asked.

Ren paused in the middle of popping a packet open. Dried fruit, from the smell of it. His head turned ever so slightly in Karo's direction. "Probably," he said. "We're almost there, assuming the koffing haven't strayed too far from where you last saw them. And it sure doesn't seem like they have.

"Once we're in there… well. Hopefully we won't need to be in there for long. If we can just get to this weapon of theirs..."

"We can wreck it," Karo finished, sounding almost gleeful about the prospect. Ren nodded in confirmation.

"...And the koffing?" Syr asked. Getting to the deranics' weapon was important. At this point, there really was no higher priority. He wasn't about to argue otherwise. But he hadn't forgotten why he'd proposed this mission in the first place. He still hoped that whatever else they had to do, whatever else came first… when all was said and done, at least some of Faurur's people would be free. "What do we do about them? About helping them," he clarified quickly.

"Whatever we can," Ren said. He paused for a long drink of water and a shake of his canteen afterward to gauge how much was left. "I think… if we disable the weapon, if we can take the deranics down or force them to surrender, that might convince the koffing that they're not worth serving any longer. If they no longer see the deranics as godlike, they might be more willing to desert them."

"They might be," Syr echoed, "but… I don't know. It didn't seem to take much to impress them in the first place." At least, that's how Faurur had made it seem. "The lights crossed the sky, and that was that. That's all it took. They just… _knew_ those were their gods."

Ren took another mouthful of his breakfast, or snack, or whatever it was, chewing in silent thought for a short time. "They just knew," he said finally. "Without meeting them."

"Right," Syr said.

"And did they know the _name_ of their gods?" Ren asked. "Without meeting them?"

Syr's frown deepened. "Yeah. They did." The very first time he'd heard the deranics spoken of by name was mere minutes after the streaks in the sky had vanished.

"Well that doesn't seem weird at all," Karo remarked.

"What did they do to them?" Syr wondered aloud. "Did they just… beam the information into their heads? Why weren't we affected?"

"Different brains," Ren said. "Their brains were compatible with the signal. Yours, I guess, were not." Another swig from the canteen. "I wouldn't be surprised at all if that little introduction wasn't all they transmitted." He lifted his hooded head. "Your friends could very well have been brainwashed."

Syr absorbed that silently. Then he hung his head. "I never doubted that they were victims in all this," he said. "I just thought… all this time, I just thought they'd been lied to, and that was it. If you're right, then they didn't even get a choice about what to believe. They didn't get to think it over. They just got _taken_. Taken all over again..."

He lifted his head again. "We _have_ to save them," he said. "Otherwise… God, otherwise everything she and I did, everything we gave up… it's all for nothing."

"I think we can," Ren said. "I honestly think we can. I think they must have something or another still broadcasting that signal to this day. If we take that out, they'll lose even more of their firepower."

A little spark of hope lit up in Syr at those words, so swiftly it surprised him. For the first time since they'd set out, he could actually, properly imagine what a successful outcome in all this might look like. Devices whose shapes he could only guess bursting into sparks and smoke and flame. The sky above darkening with the emissions of countless rejoicing koffing. Vague, wormlike creatures cowering in surrender or lying twisted in pools of—

He shook his head briskly, rippling from neck to tail in a full-body shudder. He tried to steer his thoughts back toward the happier, less gory aspects of actually succeeding in their efforts, only to lose the threads when he saw Ren suddenly shoot to his feet.

Syr whipped around to follow the human's line of sight, or where he presumed it to be. He went stock still at what he saw, his eyes widening in surprise. The twins were headed their way. Maybe they'd finished feeding. Maybe they hadn't. It was entirely possible that they'd been distracted by the things they now carried.

The shapes were slightly murky in the darkness, but it looked as though Acheron had picked up something like a branch. There was a rustling noise as it swung in his grasp, suggesting leaves, and it gave off a very faint fruity scent. Demi's cargo was silent, but less ambiguous all the same. The size, the shape, and the smell left no room for guessing. She'd caught a weezing.

"Urgh…" Ren said softly. Syr looked back just long enough to see the human leaning against Karo, his hooded head buried in one hand; he'd apparently stood up too quickly.

"You need to sit back down," Demi told him as she and her brother stopped just outside the shelter, at which Ren readily did as she suggested.

"You didn't have to go all the way back for that weezing," he said.

"You're right, and we didn't," Acheron said. "He came to us. Or tried to."

"Subtle as a blimp," Demi said, "luckily for us." She gave the weezing a little shake. He dangled from one of her right hands by his larger mouth. He was drooling something dark and glistening.

"Be careful," Syr warned. "Almost everything that comes out of them is toxic."

"Tell me about it," Demi said. "Bleh. I think I've had enough pechas for a lifetime." She let go of the weezing at this point; he hit the grass with a slight bounce and an unpleasant, watery noise.

"There's plenty more to choke down if need be," Acheron said. He plunged the branch into the soil as if he were planting it, and at this distance Syr could see that it wasn't a branch at all. The kwazai had simply uprooted an entire pecha plant.

 _There's pechas for some of us, at least, but..._ Syr cast another concerned glance back toward Ren. He was the only member of the party who had neither the immunity of a poison-type nor the option of simply washing away poison with a little fruit juice. All he could do was hope not to get poisoned in the first place.

 _Karo will protect him,_ Syr reminded himself. _He can protect all of us. Including himself._ There was a tiny little twinge of guilt as he realized that he'd actually managed to let himself forget that the nosepass was a gym leader's pokémon, same as the kwazai.

"We figured you wanted to talk to him," Acheron said, "seeing as you tried to catch him."

"You figured right." Ren took a moment to finish off the fruit packet, then fished some more food out of the pile.

"You gonna wake him now?" Karo asked.

"We probably have enough revives," Demi said.

"Hmm," Ren responded at first; then, "Give him a few minutes. Hopefully he'll wake up on his own—you went easy on him, right?" he asked, facing Demi as he spoke.

"I kept the beam on him long enough to knock him out. Not a second longer."

"Good," Ren said. "Okay, then he might come around in a timely fashion. Again, we'll give him a chance. If that fails, _then_ we revive."

As it turned out, it didn't take long at all for the weezing to stir. He shuddered in place and vented a few acrid puffs of exhaust. Then he scoffed.

"Hnrrrrrn… why?" he asked as he rose shakily. His voices were especially hoarse and quiet; Syr was helplessly reminded of how Faurur had sounded the last time she'd spoken to him.

The weezing turned and rose a bit higher to meet Demi eye to eye, wobbling all the while. "Why did you attack me? I only wanted to talk."

"You attacked me first," Syr reminded him.

"I was still hungry," the weezing said simply. "But then I thought, maybe I know you." He descended and moved closer to Syr. "You're Syr, aren't you?"

"Yes…" Syr answered.

"She used to talk about you. A lot." The weezing backed up again, still a bit unsteady in the air. "She liked you. She missed you, I think."

Syr felt an ache in his chest at that. She had only managed to reunite with him at the end of her life, but how long had she been trying?

Would she have had to wait so long if he'd stuck around?

"That's why I looked for you," the weezing went on. "To apologize." He swelled with a deep breath, then let it out in a puff of smoke. "I'm sorry," he said to Syr.

Syr shook his head. "It's…" He trailed off and shook his head again with a sigh. He couldn't pretend it was fine well enough to say that it was. "Just… if you try to eat me again," he said, "if you try to kill any of us, you could get hurt very badly. _Very_ badly," he stressed. He wanted to believe the others wouldn't kill the weezing. But he was certain that any of them would rather do so than watch any of their teammates die. "Keep that in mind, all right?"

"They'll hurt me anyway," the weezing said.

"No they won't," Ren spoke up. He stood back up; Karo shuffled into place to support him as fast as he could manage.

The weezing turned slightly to regard Ren. _Do you know what he is?_ Syr wondered. If this weezing had been one of the koffing that he and Faurur had rescued from the poacher, then he'd had experience humans before. A bad experience, at that.

 _Are you afraid of him?_

"Now, listen," Ren said. "They could've left you back there in the woods. They brought you here for a reason."

"Yeah. We've got questions for you, weezing," Karo said.

"Ongzi," the weezing corrected him. "Ongzi ursh-Ungem."

"Ongzi," Ren said. "We need you to tell us about the deranics."

"They are holy," Ongzi said.

"They're _killers_ ," Ren responded, and stood up a little straighter, no longer leaning on Karo. "Look… I know you're not going to want to hear this. And I'll understand if you don't believe it. But the fact of the matter is that they're lying to you, one way or another. They might be controlling your minds, making you think they're here for some benevolent reason when in reality they've murdered billions of people since they arrived." He was visibly shaking now. The wrapper of whichever bar or bag he'd grabbed crinkled loudly; he was clenching at least one of his fists. "Humanity is extinct because of them."

"What? That's what you think? No," Ongzi said. "Humans were killed by someone else. By enemies of the deranics."

"Enemies." Acheron folded his arms. "And who might those be?"

"The deranics don't speak their names," Ongzi answered.

"Snrk. How convenient," Karo said.

"Ongzi," Ren said again. "We need you to be honest with us, all right? There are a lot of lives at stake here, maybe even yours. And no," he added quickly, "no, that's not a threat. We're not going to kill you. We _don't want to hurt you_ any more than we already have. We didn't want to have to hurt you in the first place, and I'm sorry we had to. We're here to help you and the rest of your people."

"…My people don't need your help," Ongzi said. "My people have the holy ones."

"You really believe that, don't you," Syr said pityingly.

"Of course I do. Why shouldn't I? And why…" he asked Ren, "why should I believe you? Of course you lie. You _are_ a lie. The deranics told us that there are no humans left."

Ren sighed. Whether it was frustration at Ongzi's refusal to believe him about the deranics or relief at the weezing's refusal to believe he was human, Syr couldn't say. "All right. Okay. Believe what you will about that. We'll move on to the next question. Do you know about their weapon? If they have enemies, surely they've come up with some way to defend against them."

Ongzi kept silent at first. "Maybe," he conceded. "But I don't know anything about that."

"You're sure about that?" Demi asked.

"Yes. I'm sure," Ongzi said. "I'm telling you the truth. I haven't seen anything like that. Maybe they keep a weapon in the small burrows. The places we don't fit."

One word in particular stood out for Syr. "Burrows… they're underground, aren't they?"

More silence. "…You still think they're killers, don't you," Ongzi finally said.

"They are," Ren insisted, as gently as he could manage. He still shook a little as he spoke. "And not only of humanity but also all those people in the forest. Don't you think it's a little strange that… that… "

"Ren…?" Demi said worriedly, for the human had begun panting. The ends of her tails gave a restless flick.

"Sit back down," Acheron urged him.

"The enemies," Ongzi was saying meanwhile, "it had to have been the enemies…"

"Where," Ren said, half-gasping. He was seated again, and Demi was holding him in place with a free hand. "W-we need to know—"

" _Ren_?" Demi interrupted.

"Where… where is—"

Ren went abruptly silent. So did everything else. All at once, all Syr could hear was a strange, shrill whine, a noise that came from everywhere and nowhere all at once. The human went rigid as a board, and both kwazai were laying hands upon him and shouting silently.

Then Ren threw his head back, and an unseen force flung Syr onto his back like a rag doll.

He lay there gasping for a short while, unable to think through the throbbing pain in his head at first. It worsened as he lifted himself up, leaving him heaving uselessly for a moment. The shrill noise was gone now, but there were little spots of light burning in the back of his eyes, which lingered briefly even after he'd opened them.

Once those cleared, Syr righted himself with a groan. He gingerly turned his head toward Ren and found him standing at his full height, apparently steady on his feet. Both kwazai stood very close to him, as did Karo, but none of them appeared to be supporting him.

"I'm fine," Ren told them. "I'm… I'm genuinely fine. I feel better than I've felt in days. What the hell…" He shook his head. "What's going on with me? What did I just _do_?"

"Something psychic," Syr said, his voice hushed with awe and lingering disbelief. If he hadn't been on the receiving end of the phenomenon himself, there'd have been much more of the latter. But he knew what he'd felt. The particular, primal discomfort that element caused was unmistakable.

"The closest thing I can compare it to would be a confusion attack," Demi said. "A weak one, thankfully for you and the weezing, but… yeah. That was the real thing, Ren."

"Okay," Ren said. "Okay. So what does that mean for me?" He swallowed audibly. "What _am_ I?"

"Human," Acheron answered, but there was the slightest hint of uncertainty in his tone. "As far as I can tell." He sent a questioning look Demi's way.

"I'm getting the same picture," she said. "You're human… but it looks like you're also a psychic-type. Which isn't exactly unprecedented."

"I know," Ren said. He flexed his hands in front of himself; he'd emptied them at some point, voluntarily or otherwise. "And I know… I know that sometimes psychic awakenings take their sweet time to happen, but…" The human put a hand under his hood, at which it fell back with a soft whispering of cloth. He shook his head again, for longer this time. "I can still barely believe it…"

"I think we're all surprised," Syr said, still fairly awestruck. "To say the least."

"Syr…" There was a soft shuffling as Ren turned on the spot. "I'm so sorry," he said earnestly. "I didn't mean to hurt you."

"It's all right," Syr said, and he meant it. "You didn't really hurt me; it was just… sort of a push. She's right; it was weak."

"Still… " The human shook his head again. "I don't know. I can't guarantee it won't happen again. Or that it won't be so weak next time. If… well, maybe this is a stupid question. I'd understand if you're willing to take that risk, all things considered. But if you'd honestly rather not, I'd understand that, too."

Syr felt a stirring of guilt at the suggestion. _No. No, I can't do that. I can't run away. Not again._ "I'll stay," he said quickly. "If something happens, we have medicine, right?" _He… he probably can't hurt you worse than that,_ he told himself. The human's abilities were only just awakening. He could barely pull off a simple confusion attack. Anything worse might be outside his capability altogether, at least for a while.

"I… I will _not_ stay."

Heads and tails turned toward the pair of voices that had just spoken in unison. Ongzi, it seemed, was only just getting up. He rose very slowly and shakily, and only got himself about two feet off the ground before apparently giving up.

"I don't want to spend any more time with you," he went on. "I don't want to answer any more questions. And… " He inhaled deeply, swelling dramatically, before letting the breath back out on a sigh. "I'm sorry. I can't let you go there. I'm sorry, Syr. I'm sorry, Faurur." He inflated again, emitting a blinding glow—

— which cut out in an instant as its source fell unconscious to the grass below. A gentler, more colorful light shone around Demi's outstretched hand for a moment more before dissipating.

"I had really hoped he wouldn't try that," she said.

Syr stared at the fallen weezing. He was grateful that the explosion had been thwarted, but he worried for their would-be attacker all the same. "Is he okay?"

"He's okay," Demi assured him. "I promise you. He'll wake up just fine after a while."

"And we will _not_ be here when he does," Ren said. He turned southward. "Underground," he said, apparently thinking aloud. "Around where you saw those streaks go, I'd imagine. I guess you'll be leading the way from here on out," he told Syr.

"I guess so," Syr said. He scanned the southern horizon. It was hard to make out much of anything at this hour. "It'd be easier to do during the day, but… " But there was no telling, after all, how long it would be before the deranics fired again. "I can get us back to where I used to live. If we start digging westward from there… "

"That's our plan, then." Ren dropped into a crouch and began scooping everything back into the pack. Once he'd gathered everything and straightened himself back up, he recalled Karo.

"Give them directions," the human said, as Demi picked him up. Acheron scooped Syr up at roughly the same time.

"Okay. South for now," Syr said. The kwazai took off immediately, leaving Ongzi behind.

Syr looked back over Acheron's shoulder as they departed the scene, trusting that Demi was truthful about Ongzi's condition but hoping he'd be all right regardless. It seemed as though the weezing was still under the deranics' sway for the time being… but hopefully, hopefully, that wouldn't be the case for much longer. Only once he was free would Ongzi well and truly be all right.

 _We'll fight for you,_ Syr promised as he turned back toward their destination. _I promise, we'll fight for you. We won't run._

 _I won't run…_


	13. Kindred Spirits

**Chapter 13 – Kindred Spirits**

Jen was officially missing.

Many hours had passed since Solonn and Grosh had arrived in Convergence. Hours largely spent waiting for someone to return to that house on Bayberry Street, or to leave it. No one had.

When Quiul had come back around to teleport the two of them to Sinnoh once more, they'd had her warp them into the house instead. They'd searched all three floors, searched the labs, searched the library of sorts that apparently lay between the two. They'd found no one, and no sign whatsoever of a struggle.

Just like that, Jen was gone again. Gone, when they'd only just gotten him back.

" _We found him before,"_ Grosh had said, in a cold, rumbling voice that had promised certain doom for whoever had taken the cryonide this time. " _We_ will _find him again."_

At the very least, they would sure as hell try.

But they weren't about to do so on their own. Whoever, whatever had taken Jen might very well have also taken an entire Apex League-level team. In that event, they could be up against a very, very dangerous enemy. They would need whatever support they could get.

So it was that Solonn, Grosh, and Quiul now made their way into a cave system at the edge of Hirashka territory, in the far northern reaches of Sinnoh. With them were four other glalie: Narzen, Evane, and Viraya, who'd accompanied them the last time Jen had gone missing; and Roskharha, one of the Hirashka authorities. A claydol drifted along near the back: Oth, one of Solonn's closest friends.

Others might join them, before all was said and done. Quiul had connections in many regions, with a wide variety of pokémon. But she had suggested that they seek out volunteers closer to home first. In particular, she had recommended the beings who called these caverns home.

The walls surrounding the party glowed, emitting an eerie, blue-green light. Ectoplasm was woven into the ice that glazed the stone surfaces, forming intricate patterns. This was the work of the Sisterhood, the froslass of the Hirashka nation. As ghost-types, like Quiul, their abilities could prove highly valuable in the likely event that the enemy had a teleporter on their side; there was a very good chance said teleporter would be a psychic-type.

Whether or not they _would_ lend their support remained to be seen.

As of late, the Sisterhood had been kept fairly busy. In addition to their own rituals, their own roles within Hirashka society, they had also taken upon themselves to keep the Sinaji glalie in line.

The Sinaji had once been dangerous enemies of Solonn's former nation, and no one was about to argue that devoting resources to making sure they caused no further trouble was prudent. But the Sisterhood had unearthed another lode of dawn stones just a couple of days prior. They had swelled their ranks.

If they still couldn't spare at least one of their number… Solonn would understand. But if they _could_ …

At the edges of his vision, pale shapes drifted in and out from behind the cover of the icy columns that lined the halls. He heard the froslass whispering among themselves but couldn't make out a word of it, not over the grinding of steel on stone as his father followed along behind him, nor over the sound of the steelix's armored segments anxiously turning.

Solonn's eyelight dampened and wavered in sympathy. Grosh considered Jen family every bit as much as he did. Hopefully… hopefully, neither of them would have to fear for him for much longer. And hopefully no one would have to fear for him ever again.

One of the froslass finally approached them. "Hello," she said. "I suppose you've come here for a reason?"

"Yes," Roskharha said. "We need to speak with Khirika."

"Of course," the froslass said, then swept off into the shadows.

Solonn barely had time to wonder how long she'd take before she returned, this time with another froslass at her side. The first froslass excused herself, leaving the seven of them with Khirika.

"Ah," she said, "it's you again. The newcomers. I'm told you have need of me?"

Roskharha nodded. "An honorary member of our nation has been abducted," he said. "Vanished without a trace."

"That's not all," Quiul added. "Several other people might've been taken, too. Including what might very well be the last member of a dying species."

Khirika's eyes swept over each member of the party in turn. Trying to gauge their sincerity, perhaps, a notion which bothered Solonn in spite of himself.

She folded her hands. "And you believe this requires our aid, specifically?"

"Not specifically," Quiul said. "But ideally. We might have a psychic culprit on our hands. Considering that the ones who've gone missing are ordinarily quite capable of holding their own, from what I gather, we might have several. Either way, we suspect they're not pushovers."

The froslass held her gaze for a long time. Then she unclasped her hands. Two tiny, green wisps of light hovered between them for a moment before shooting off toward deeper caverns.

"I'm afraid we don't quite have the resources you may have hoped for," Khirika said. "But these two, I think, will be more than willing to assist you."

Soon after, another froslass arrived on the scene, followed by yet another. "You called?" the second of them said.

"I did," Khirika said. "Newcomers, these are Ashika and Rhasiras." She indicated each of them in turn with a wave of her hand. "Why don't you tell them what you've told me?" she prompted the party.

Once the summoned froslass had been briefed, they shared a brief glance. Rhasiras nodded.

"We'll do it," Ashika said. "When do we leave?"

"Immediately," Grosh said. "As it is, we've got other stops to make."

"Take care, you two," Khirika said as the two volunteers moved forward to join the party.

"Of course," Rhasiras said, before she and the others were teleported off to their next destination.

\- o -

Darkness. The smell of dirt. For more than an hour now, Syr had known little else. He was underground, burrowing through the remaining time and space between his team and their goal. Damp earth parted before him as he corkscrewed through, packed tight along the sides by the ground-type power that propelled him.

It petered out once again, and he took the opportunity to rest and allow the others to catch up, same as he'd done in the wake of each preceding dig. Ren and Karo were trudging along behind him. It was Karo's innate magnetic sense that kept them on course now. It was the psychic signature of many, many lifeforms that had shown them the way in the first place.

The five of them had followed that signal above ground for a time. They'd stopped and gone to ground upon seeing, and smelling, the vast cloud of smog that utterly blanketed their destination. The less of that Ren had to breathe, the better.

The kwazai were stowed for the time being. It was better not to force Syr to dig a wider tunnel than was strictly necessary, Ren had figured aloud. Syr hadn't argued, and still didn't; the work was demanding enough as it was without the extra effort that would've been required to make room for very tall beings with bodies ill-suited to crawling.

He gave his head a shake, casting off mud and small stones; he heard them bounce harmlessly off the walls. He craned his neck back toward the others. "I think I could use a leppa."

"Already got it out for you," Ren said.

Syr nodded in recognition; he could taste the fruit on the air, even amidst the competing scents of soil and poorly-washed human. He doubled over on himself a little awkwardly, his tongue flitting repeatedly toward the leppa smell until it made contact with the firm, waxy skin. One more flick to lap it up, and then it was back to work.

"Oh hey. Hey!" Karo called out, barely any sooner than Syr had resumed digging.

The arbok stopped burrowing, shuddering as he lost the elemental charge. "What? What's going on?"

"Some kind of magnetic field flared up outta nowhere up ahead," Karo said.

"They know we're coming," Syr said. It was more an assumption than a suspicion, and one the entire party had shared before they'd even begun tunneling. If the deranics really were worms, it was easy to imagine that they were natural burrowers. It would surely occur to such creatures that something could approach from underground.

"Of course they do," Ren said. There wasn't any surprise in his voice, but there certainly was tension.

"Uh… it's getting stronger," Karo reported.

Ren spat out a curse. "Shield, now!"

The pressure engulfed Syr in an instant and let up just as fast. He drew back, muscles tensed, bracing for… something. What was Ren anticipating? Some sort of beam or pulse? A long, thin hiss passed through his fangs. If it was the weapon, maybe he'd be unharmed—or maybe not, at this range…

Seconds passed. Nothing happened, or so it seemed. "Karo?" Ren prompted.

"It's keeping steady," the nosepass said. "Guess it's not building up to anything after all."

"Hm." Ren didn't sound especially convinced. He let another few moments pass. "All right," he said finally. "Bring it down. Syr? Let's get moving again."

Hoping they weren't letting their guard down too soon, Syr crept forward once more and tested the wall with his snout. The moment he felt yielding earth instead of an impenetrable field, he called up another dig attack.

Just as he was beginning to wonder how much further they had to go, the tunnel opened quite suddenly into empty space. For the first time since he'd begun digging, he bothered to open his eyes, but found the cavern—or whatever it was—just as dark as the tunnel that had led to it. He sampled the air and found it much less stale-tasting than he'd have expected. There was a strange scent about, reminiscent of a summer storm.

He pulled back into the tunnel. "Guys? I think we're here."

"Okay," Ren said. "How much space is there? Enough for the twins?"

"I think so," Syr replied. "I can make it bigger if need be." Assuming all the walls were dirt and loose rocks, anyway. Reminding himself that there was someone just feet behind him who could shield him at a moment's notice, he returned to the hole in the wall and let himself emerge into the open.

He reared up as high as he could and found no ceiling, stretched out as far as he could and found no walls in any direction but behind. "Oh yeah," he said. "There's room. I think this place is pretty big."

Ren and Karo followed him out into the hollow. Lights flashed as the two kwazai were unleashed, and for a split second Syr caught a glimpse of something dark and metallic overhead. It seemed that they were directly underneath the deranics' base.

"Light it up," Ren instructed.

Syr felt a prickle of awareness that psychic energy was building nearby; out of the corner of his eye, he saw colorful light swelling around at least two of Demi's hands. Psybeams burst forth, rainbow searchlights sweeping harmlessly over the walls—

—gone in a literal flash, as much brighter light suddenly flooded the room.

Syr tried to shout, but something punched the air out of him the instant he opened his mouth. He heard Acheron snarling and Demi swearing as he caught his breath.

He realized he was unharmed at around the same time as the searing pink blankness finally faded out from behind his closed eyes. With a groan, he shook the last of the haze out of his head and finally took in his surroundings.

The five of them were now in a vast, oblong space. The walls were brown-black, packed soil dotted with gray and white stone. There were thick, metal pillars embedded in it; one of them stood less than a yard from the tunnel's opening. A few more had been raised in the middle of the room, supporting the structure above.

Some twenty feet overhead, there curved the belly of an enormous, rust-red cylinder. It was dotted with floodlights that cast a warm, white glow over its metallic surface and the five beings who gazed up at it from below.

That was just the part that they could see. There was no telling how far the base extended beyond the earthen walls. No telling how much lay beneath the curtain of smog beyond the surface.

A wave of dizziness washed over Syr, and he realized he'd been forgetting to breathe for who knew how long. He gulped in air and felt it lodge in his throat. There it was: his destination, his mission, now literally hanging over his head, closer than ever before. Closer, and much more daunting.

A roaring sound rang out at his side. He flicked a gaze toward it and saw Acheron trying to burn a hole through the ceiling above. The dark-type energy spread out over its surface, forming rippling, violet-black circles that dissipated into nothing at their edges. The kwazai bared his teeth and snarled again, lifting another hand to redouble his efforts, to no avail.

He let the twin reflux beams die out. "Damn it," he spat out between gasps.

"Shielded," Ren muttered as he fished out another leppa berry for the kwazai. "Thought as much."

"It's got to give out eventually," Demi figured aloud. "Whatever's powering that has to have a finite source."

 _So have we,_ Syr thought uneasily as he watched Acheron wolf down the proffered berry. How many of those were left?

As another pair of reflux beams plowed into the invisible shield above, the floodlights dimmed somewhat. At first, Syr wondered if the deranics were already running out of power to keep the barrier up. He hoped that they were. But then another, different sort of light bloomed on the underside of the base: a single point of a slightly cooler hue.

Another sudden wave of pressure came and took his breath away; he recognized Karo's block field this time. He braced for a possible attack again… but as before, none came. The new light merely cast a small, blue-white circle on the floor a short distance in front of them.

Then the light turned a pale yellow, and it resolved into the shape of a worm.

The first thing that struck Syr was how _small_ they were. He'd been expecting something larger somehow. Closer to his own size, if not larger. Instead he found himself looking upon a creature who couldn't have attained eye level with him even if they'd stood on the end of their tail. They were dark yellow and scaleless, with a short, pointed snout and six bright pink eyes arranged in a ring around their head.

"Hello, arbok," the deranic said in a somewhat high-pitched, slightly buzzing voice.

Syr didn't respond, staring warily at them. His tongue flicked out, seeking the scent of the new arrival… and finding nothing new. As he watched the deranic, they shimmered ever so slightly. Flickered a bit. He recognized the technology, though its name escaped him at the moment. The deranic was nothing but a projected image. They weren't actually there.

"We weren't expecting any of your people to come back," the deranic went on. Speaking the language of the koffing and weezing, Syr realized then. "We… had hoped you wouldn't. We don't want there to be any more fighting."

"No," Ren spoke up. The tremor was back in his voice, the one Syr had come to recognize as anger rising to the surface. "No, wiping out the other side from a good, safe distance, giving them no chance to fight back… that's more your style, isn't it?"

"We didn't want it to be," the deranic said. Their tone didn't change in the least; it was impossible to tell if they were truly remorseful. "But we have no choice. The enemy is powerful. And there are so few of us. The only way to destroy them is to surprise them."

"They understand my language…" Ren noted, barely audible.

"You're not destroying a damn thing from here on out," Demi said, taking a step forward; despite the fact that they weren't actually anywhere near her, the deranic squirmed back a bit. "You've done _more_ than enough."

"Sadly… we have not. Many more must die." Dark membranes slid over all six eyes in unison. "Very many… including all of us."

"Well, congrats," Karo said. "You're officially nuts."

Syr couldn't help but agree. It was hard to imagine why they had destroyed humanity. Hard to imagine why they were apparently bent on destroying even more of the world's peoples. But why, he wondered, would they want to destroy themselves in the process?

"There is no other way," the deranic insisted. "No other chance. Soon, they will come here. We must make sure they won't leave. We will die. Many will die. But so will _they_. It's a terrible, terrible thing… but it's what's right. This world will die, but many, many more will live because of this sacrifice."

Syr shook his head. "This doesn't make any sense," he said. "How is killing an entire world's worth of innocent people supposed to save anyone? You're talking about… about other worlds? We aren't like you. We can't even _reach_ any other planet."

"No," the deranic said. "No, you don't understand. _You_ are not the threat. You are not the ones who destroyed our people. The ones who destroyed the human people."

The rest of what the deranic had said finally reached Syr, finally made it past the promises of widespread death and destruction and slotted into place. " _Soon, they will come here."_

 _Was_ there someone else in the picture? Someone else who killed from afar, who had yet to arrive in person?

" _Humans were killed by someone else. By enemies of the deranics,"_ said a pair of voices in his memory.

" _Don't trust them,"_ said another.

"You are expecting a _hell_ of a lot from us, deranic," Ren said. His voice was quieter now, but still shaking with rage. "Here you are, asking us to believe in an enemy you can't provide a scrap of evidence for. Expecting us to trust you, when _at the very least_ you have certainly killed dozens if not _hundreds_ of helpless pokémon. Expecting us to be all right with the fact that you've decided to sacrifice us all without giving us a say in the matter."

The deranic was silent for a moment. "Some of the koffing here think you're in disguise. We had hoped not, but…" Again the deranic closed their eyes, in their peculiar fashion. "Maybe if you really were human, you would understand. We would be the same. The last of our kind. Survivors of the same enemy, wishing for an end to their evil."

"We are _not_ the same," Ren said. "Acheron?"

The kwazai nodded, acknowledging the implied command. He looked toward the projected image. "See you soon, worm," he said, then went back to trying to burn through the ceiling.

The deranic made a sound that might've been a sigh. "So it must be," they said, then vanished.

The shield didn't hold out much longer. Dropped on purpose, perhaps, which stoked Syr's unease further. Were they being admitted into a trap?

Metal gave way with a loud sizzling, and soon light poured out from inside the base. "Up here, sis," Acheron said, at which Demi leapt and vaulted herself up onto his shoulders with her large upper hands. He held her ankles as she reached up, seized the irregular edges of the hole he'd made, and ripped it open wide enough to make a usable entrance.

With a grunt, she hoisted herself in. One by one, Acheron began lifting the rest of the party up to her waiting arms. As Syr's turn came up, he wondered if the kwazai could feel his heart hammering away. This was it. Soon, very soon, this would all be over—one way or another.

\- o -

Jen hadn't known what to expect ever since he'd found himself among the deoxys. Certainly he hadn't expected to be served dinner. Or breakfast, or whatever it was. There was no telling time in a place like this.

But sure enough, there was a table raised in front of him and Babs, or rather what passed for a table. It was more of a pillar, really, quite a bit wider than it was tall, and made out of the same, metallic gray material as the surrounding walls and floor. In fact, it had literally grown up from the floor, fast and fluidly. He'd watched it happen. The odd sort of shifting-sand noise that had accompanied the process sounded in his mind once more as he remembered it.

" _It's almost like this place is_ alive _,"_ he'd said to Babs after the table had formed. She'd agreed with him. He'd been kind of hoping she wouldn't. Knowing that the two of them were apparently stuck in outer space was unsettling enough. The idea that they might furthermore be _inside a living creature_ was even worse.

Sitting right in front of him, in a small indent in the table, were several pale green lumps of… something. Grown from the "ship", if it could be called that, same as the table. The deoxys had told Babs that the food they had to offer was safe, carefully assembled on a molecular level to be compatible with each of their guests' chemistry. They'd probably meant that to be assuring.

Babs had not managed to sound quite as assuring when she'd relayed that information to him. She didn't seem to trust the food herself; there was none of it in front of her. The only thing filling her bowl (such as it was) was a generous helping of water—melted snow, which Jen had personally provided. The deoxys apparently had their own water to offer, but she'd declined that, as well. She cupped some more of it in her webbed hands as he watched, drinking some and deliberately spilling the rest over the top of her head.

He might have turned down the deoxys' offerings, as well, except that he was feeling genuinely famished, as if he'd gone several days without eating anything at all—which, for all he knew, he had. Another part of him wondered if maybe this was some side effect of being used as a psychically-operated translator.

Either way, he didn't feel as though he had the luxury of turning his figurative nose up at the food he'd been given. Hoping the deoxys were right about them being safe, and hoping his poison typing would protect him if they were wrong, he speared one of the strange, green nuggets on a single claw, froze it there, and delicately nipped off a piece.

His eyes widened. The green stuff was delicious.

"Babs?" he said once his mouth was clear. "Are you sure you don't want to try any of this? It's actually really, really good…"

The greninja was staring into the water. Without a sound, without looking up at him, she shook her head.

Maybe there was more than mistrust quelling her appetite.

Jen returned his sights to the food, but not his attention. He munched away at the nuggets, freezing and biting chunks off them on autopilot, all the while trying to decide exactly what he should say to help ease her mind.

He faced her again. "They said we'll be home soon, right?"

Babs pulled in a long breath and let it hiss out her nostrils. "Yeah. They said that. And maybe they were telling the truth; who knows." A hand disappeared into the folds of her tongue to prop her head up. "But hell, who knows what these guys consider 'soon'?"

"I don't even know how long we've been here," Jen admitted.

"Same here. It feels like it's been at least a day." Her free hand clenched into a fist. It trembled, in rage or worry or both. "God, it could already be too late. Days too late."

"Or maybe it's not," Jen said quietly. He couldn't be sure either way, of course. All he knew for certain was that Ren had survived this far. The human had been living in the same house with Jen and Babs and their contamination for days before leaving Convergence, breathing air that might have carried the plague. Had lived for years and years prior to that, and who was to say that the metal tube had actually kept the virus out?

"Maybe he's just immune," the cryonide speculated aloud. "And maybe he's not the only one." A sentiment he hadn't heard spoken aloud in a while, he realized. Not since the last time he'd visited the Hope Institute. A prickle of doubt made his eyelight stutter.

 _Just because he was lying about some things doesn't mean he was lying about that,_ he told himself.

Babs took another drink. "He'd better be," she said. "Nobody has the right to take him from us."

There was another shifting noise then, as the material forming one of the walls (its _flesh_ , Jen thought, at which he shivered) parted to create a doorway where none had been before. A deoxys hovered just beyond it. They seemed to beckon with their tentacles.

"We're wanted for something," Jen supposed.

Babs stood up. "This had better be good," she told the new arrival, pointing at them for emphasis. She gave herself one last splash in the face, followed by a vigorous shake of her head and shoulders. "Come on," she said to Jen as she began striding toward the doorway.

Jen started to follow, but paused at a faint, gnawing sensation in his stomach. With a flick of his hand, he skewered a couple more nuggets for the road, then hurried after her.

He sped through the red-and-green-veined halls, glad the post-puppeting dizziness had long since worn off; he doubted the deoxys' offerings would taste as good coming back up. The deoxys eventually led them up a steep ramp, at which point he initially struggled a bit. He resorted to leaning forward and using his claws for added traction, hoping the surrounding vessel wouldn't mind.

The ramp opened into a room barely larger than the one he and Babs had left but much, much busier. Deoxys of varying shapes and sizes lined the walls, all of their tentacles and some of their faces and chests buried in swathes of shimmering gray and panels of soft, glowing aquamarine. Others flitted back and forth across the room, some barely skimming the floor, some hovering higher overhead. They nimbly dodged around Jen, Babs, and their deoxys escort as they passed.

"All right," Babs spoke up. "I'm going to assume we're in here for a reason. Got something to show us? Or tell us, maybe? If it's the latter, you know the drill. You run it by _him_ first," she told the deoxys firmly, gesturing toward Jen.

The escort fluttered the ends of their tentacles in a way that could've meant anything or nothing at all. They said something aloud, at which the rest of the deoxys cleared a space at the front of the room.

The wall there, formerly gray, darkened to black. A point of faintly blue light shone at its center. There was a shimmering of green in one corner, tiny symbols flashing by much too fast to have read even if Jen had known the language… and then the blue dot began growing. It began showing other colors: swirls and patches of white, strips and blotches of green and brown. Another, much smaller point of light appeared at its side as it grew.

Jen had realized what he was looking at before the image had finished zooming. He wasn't entirely sure he could believe it. The same went for Babs, he imagined.

"I think they're trying to tell us we're almost there," he said.

"Yeah," Babs responded, through a throat that sounded constricted. "I really hope you're not jerking us around, deoxys," she told their escort. "We'd better be close. And you had better be willing to send us back down there as soon as possible."


End file.
